gr5

I had to read your post 3 times. Are you talking about steps 9 and 10 in this section? http://wiki.ultimaker.com/Ultimaker_rev.4_assembly:_Extrusion_head#Parts_needed_in_this_section_4 If so, Move the head to the extremens in X and later Y axes (either order). Watch the belt where it goes through the block and as the block approaches the pulleys you don't want the belt crooked - the pulley should be lined up so the belt is straight. Check in each corner. Slide the pulley back and forth until it seems happiest (centered). The least strain. You can also try to visually look from above at a rod and belt at the same time. If you move your head so you can just barely see the edges of the belt and the rod at the same time you can tell if they are aligned. Also if your belts aren't aligned you may hear a ticking sound later. Anyway just do a good job and it's easy to come back to this step on some future date after you have been printing. More important is to tighten the hell out of those 8 set screws as they tend to slip when printing.

It handles it by extruding slightly more plastic than normal. This sounds like a great solution. Don't forget to put the settings back for a future "normal" print (whatever that is).

Is this happening on mildly overhanging corners? I mean - where this is happening - is each successive layer supposed to be farther from the center of the part? Or is it happening on vertical corners and shrinking corners as well?

Usually "old" filament issues involve water getting into the filament which then turns to gas in the hot end causing blobs and voids. Not plugging issues.

Look over your filament and make sure it is dust free. Maybe wipe it with a tissue. Also open your extruder and look inside and make sure there aren't any chewed up pieces of wood splinters in there.

Another thought: The old Cura has a setting "Extra length on start". Make sure that is zero!

I would try printing a 10mmX10mmX10mm cube first. Also it's possible there is something wrong with your fan. Is it on? Is it blowing on the part (or sucking?)?

Oh wow! Something is seriously wrong. You appear to be over extruding by about 2X. Have you printed other objects? There are many things that can cause this: Z axis is moving wrong amount by factor of 2X. You can test this by moving the Z axis 10mm and see if it indeed moves 10mm. This is a probablem that came up recently (there was a bad jumper on the board). Extruder calibrated wrong by 2X. Same sort of test. Pull the filament OUT of the print head (with the head hot) until only a few centimeters are in the bowden tube. Mark the filament below the feeder with a pen. Tell the extruder to extrude 10mm. See if the mark moves 10mm. Cura calibrated wrong - In Cura is your nozzle set to .4mm?

So what was your conclusion? Extruder or nozzle? How did you decide? What fixed it?

I'm guessing that's infill. You should know that if your wall is .8 then a skin of .4 will do two passes and setting skin to .8 doesn't really make a difference. I don't know the answer but I have some things that will take 2 seconds to try as you can see the results in slice view. Try turning off infill just to see what happens. Try leaving infill on but setting infill overlap to 0% or even -50% (yes, negative). If there is no overlap then there shouldn't be room for any infill. I think the overlap is enough that Cura tries to connect the walls together with infill. If the above two approaches convince you that the issue isn't infill related, then I guess lie to cura and tell it your nozzle is .39 and then .41 mm just to see what happens. You can lie to Cura about your nozzle width - it will put out more or less plastic than normal accordingly. People have said you can lie by about 25% - much more than that and it the results aren't so good. I've never tried it.

Seems easier to just use older cura than to glue two pieces together that won't exactly fit because of shrinkage.

19.5cm is fine as long as the brim or skirt or support doesn't go beyond 205 or so mm. Make sure these settings don't go beyond about 2mm on each side. You didn't answer if you have skirt or brim turned on and if so what settings those are at (what's the skirt distance or number of brim passes?) I would probably use the brim feature to help hold down this part but only 4 passes to keep from hitting the limit switches. When printing the first layer I would put my ear near the limit switches and listen for that quiet "click".

I'm still not convinced it's not the extruder part. If you *do* take the nozzle off, be very gentle. A huge amount of people who try this break it. Make sure it is nice and hot when you start twisting.

Oh - and that gun won't be printable without support. I would consider - hmm. Every part has it's challenges. Well you could use tons and tons of support. I would print it 1/4 size the first time just so you understand the issues. Or you could split it in half down the middle and print each half with the sliced off part down. Then glue the two halves together later. Personally I guess I would add some support in the cad - maybe one post per inch along the gun barrel. Make sure you get the UM printing something small and easy before you move on to something that will waste a lot of plastic if it fails half way in.

Run the wizard and tell it you have an ultimaker and cancel once it asks you to do touch a limit switch or something that requires an actual ultimaker. I do this all the time on my computers that are in a different room than the UM. This should set up all the necessary defaults such as where the origin is and what the dimensions are of the bed. You can also set this stuff up manually in "file" "preferences".

Thanks for the tip! However most people just clean the blue tape with isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol found next to bandages at any drugstore. The blue tape has some kind of non-adhesive to keep it from sticking to itself (otherwise you would never be able to get it off the spool) and you have to remove that before PLA sticks well. Once the blue tape is clean it will sometimes work for quite a few prints before getting torn up or worn away.

Some people mess up their flow setting and set it to 1 (1%) instead of 115% or so needed for ABS. Could this be it? Turn the extruder gear by hand when the nozzle is at temp. How does it feel? Does it come out all nice and squirty? Raise the temp just a bit - 5C at a time. Maybe the spring in your extruder setup slipped and needs tightening? Look at the delrin wheel inside the extruder carefully. Does it spin? Does it have a flattened side to it? Is it jammed?

Please answer illuminarti's questions. To answer if it is nozzle/heat related versus extruder related, test how much the extruder can pull when the filament isn't reaching the nozzle (pull it back a bit). It should be able to pull about 22 pounds without slipping. There are other tests, but this one is a good one. If it fails this test then send us pictures of your extruder when it is closed all the way. If it passes then concentrate on temperature and clogged nozzle issues.

Oh and maybe you can send us a photo of your z coupler (at the bottom of the z screw). Please answer all the questions that were in the earlier posts. They are all good questions and we need to know this before giving more advice.

Using cura (or pronterface - it's free!) move the z axis down in 10mm steps. Measure this roughly with a ruler. Does it look correct? Is it only moving 5mm possibly? (always consitently half the correct amount? failure mode 1) or does it sometimes less than 10mm and then other times work fine? Does it get stuck? If everything is fine then rehome and move down 1mm at a time for 10 times. Did it move the full 10mm? If everything still fine, put a ruler on the back corner of the machine as close to the bed as possible. Tape it there securely. Place a pencil or flat ruler or something on the bed so it reaches the ruler. Move the bed down in 1mm and .1mm increments. Test it carefully.

Look in the plugin for "G0" and change it to "G1" and it will probably work. Some of these plugins are looking for actions at a particular Z height and the move uses a G1 now (used to use a G0) or something like that. If you get it to work, please post the corrected plugin and mention that it works for cura 13.06. The old cura didn't use both type of moves and only used G0.

That's what I did a while back. I put the filament only a little into the bowden tube and then marked it >100mm below the extruder and measured it exactly, then ran it for 100mm and measured where the mark had moved up to

Look at the picture in this post (the 5 cubes) carefully (zoom way the hell in) and read all the text associated with the pictures: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/1872-some-calibration-photographs/?p=14396 Then read 2 posts below that with the diagram explaining the issue of infill not touching edge.

>on one side I get a posetive band on the other. Hmm. strange. A clue. Could be hardware then. Loose belts (play aka backlash) could explain this actually. But I still think most likely software. >so i dont save out the Gcode. I think cura saves it regardless. Somewhere. Not sure where. Well just reslice the same part then with the same settings and look at the "layer" view. See if the same "shift" is in the gcode. What I was talking about (fix horrible discussion): Some models violate rules of having one inside and one outside. For example lets say you have a cube and then add the letter F on the side. In the cad you might create these seperately then select the F and place it touching (and slightly inside) a face of the cube. Some cad will do a union and remove the extra walls at this point. Some won't (e.g. sketchup won't). So at this point a ray (a straight line) passing into the F will pass through the wall of the F, then the wall of the cube, then the back of the F, through the majority of the cube and through a final wall a the back of the cube. What is cura to do? There are two external and two interal walls here. SHould it make part of the cube hollow? Or should it union it all together? That's what those "fix horrible" settings are all about. Often the part looks fine when you load into cura in normal view but when you look at "xray" view you can see these internal messups and when cura slices there are "shifts" or "holes" or all kinds of weirdness. >printed with a 1mm wall What? Skin? Or is it 1mm in the STL? There's a big difference. The skin setting works best if it is always a multiple of the nozzle diameter (.4mm) so 1mm skin is going to overextrude the inner pass which is messy. Better to do .8 or 1.2mm skin (2 or 3 passes). 1mm STL wall is even more complicated so let us know if that model has a 1mm wall.

Well there seems to be something wrong with your meter. I don't think there should be any voltages less than gnd. Measure the voltage at the gnd pin of the darlington. Maybe you should be measuring the base to emitter voltages (lower 2 pins) with the fan on and off. Does the fan work now? I'm a little confused. I would expect that pin 6 coming from the arduino to be at 5V when the fan is supposed to be on and 0V when the fan is supposed to be off. Assuming 100% and 0%. Using pwm (e.g. 50%) will confuse things and make it hard to use the meter accurately.