nick-foley

There is a plugin that (indirectly) accomplishes this by gradually reducing the temperature across a Z range.

Yeah, I've got printbl White in two machines now and it is definitely a little weird. I really like the results though - pure white prints look incredibly clean - and that more or less makes up for the tiny hit in print quality I get with the white. I agree that it never gets quite as liquid as the other printbl filaments I've tried. Anyway, I've been using the newer rolls of Ultimaker silver more over the past few days and I now hate it less. Like the printbl white, it just doesn't seem to get quite as flow-y as more ideal filaments, and so it needs to be printed a little slower (50-60mm/s) than I would normally print. At those speeds and low temps (195-205°) I can get pretty awesome results. Upping temps and raising the speed just doesn't seem to allow the print quality to scale with this filament though. I do appreciate the increased "sparkliness" of this newer filament though, because that surface texture does a lot to conceal build lines. My favorite filament so far is the printbl lime green. We've now gone through 9 of the 22 colors offered by printbl, and the lime green has the nicest output quality regardless of print speed or temp, and a great low-gloss finish that makes prints look even smoother.

Great to know! Makes me a little less afraid to break a brass tube. What are the belt combs?

Has anyone tried this with Sugru?

I no longer adjust my bed using the paper method. I have found it to be unnecessarily tedious and the process too distanced from the result it is trying to achieve. It is much easier to simply send a job which has a large and long skirt and adjust the screws while the skirt prints, until you have a uniform, well-adhered first layer. This process eliminates all of the guesswork and conflated variables associated with the paper method, because you directly influence the end result in real time.

Yeah, I've been struggling with random print stoppages for a while now. It happens on two machines. They are printing from Raspberry Pi's, however, which makes it tough to diagnose the problem. I don't know if my cause is the same as yours, but the result is the same. My primary suspect right now is overheating of (or possibly, damage to) one of the stepper motor drivers. I have not seen the problem since replacing the stepper driver PCBs with Pololu versions on one machine. The other machine has been behaving lately. Anyway, it could conceivably be related to an underpowered USB hub. I would try using a powered, external USB hub if it is available to you. I would also recommend getting a Raspberry Pi and printing through Botqueue... because it makes you feel like you are in the future. But it may or may not solve your problem.

Loose pulleys. Also, start out with thicker layers (0.15 or 0.2), as they are easier to diagnose. Also, print with thicker shells and bottoms to give yourself more printed area to examine. Mostly solid prints are easier to achieve than hollow-ish ones.

Ordered the goods to make this happen (along with a GT2 upgrade) today. Using couplers and pulleys from Adafruit, shafts from McMaster, belts from SDP-SI. Hopefully the upgrade combo will give some better XY repeatability. Currently, even with tight belts, i'm noticing a very slight shift whenever the print direction (ie clockwise vs. ccw) of the skin changes. Totally negligible on large parts, but problematic on small parts with critical fits. Will post a part quality before-and-after photo as soon as the upgrades are implemented.

Oh, yes. Forgot about that. You need to upload custom firmware that has a higher temperature limit. It's extremely easy to do - either use the Marlin builder or download the source code and adjust the config files and compile it yourself in arduino. Also, it's worth noting that from checking my temperature logs, once my print cooling fan turns on, the nozzle temp maxes out around 275-280°C because the fan is cooling the nozzle somewhat and the heater can't keep up. I need to re-print my cooling fan duct so that this isn't the case... ...anyway, your results may vary, but you might not need to set your temps all the way up to 290°.

I love the results I'm getting from 3mm Ultimachine natural ABS. I have some Ultimaker black, but it seemed to smell more and adhere to itself less. I haven't tried printing anything particularly large - maybe 5cm x 10cm is the biggest - the "Spool End" from this thing: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:10219 is our largest print so far. Adhesion has been somewhat solved by printing with a large, heavy raft. Very thick parts will still curl somewhat, but it's been manageable. I can definitely say now that using ABS solves any retraction-related clogging issues with this hotend. We use 30mm/s and 3mm with consistently good results. Anyway, the here's a link to our print profile for anyone interested in ABS with this hotend: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3035088/Rambutan%20ABS%20HQ%20v0.8.ini

It's called stringing, and lowering your nozzle temp 5-10° should solve the problem almost entirely.

Looks great!

Printing directly on the acrylic bed will solve your curling problems 100% - but you probably won't be able to remove the part in one piece when it's done! What we do is remove the blue tape in patches wherever the corners are peeling. That way, you have the great adhesion of PLA on acrylic where you need it, and the ease of removal of PLA on blue tape for the rest.

So sweet but so preposterously expensive.... Makes MIC-6 look cheap.

Yeah, this seems like a lot of work for something that isn't really an issue - Maybe if you're leaving your filament out for many (6+?) months at a time? All summer we've left our filament exposed in a humid, sweaty, NYC office and frequently have the doors and windows open while it is raining. There has been no discernible change in print quality with various filaments... even nylon. I think the only material I would consider drying would be PC, if I ever decide to print in it and need something clearish.

Looks like a combination of slight over-extrusion, a slight amount of oozing from printing slower and hotter than you need to, and maybe a slightly too low amount of retraction. It could also be too slow of a travel speed - make sure that's at 150 or higher.

You are getting serious under-extrusion. Probably due to clogging/jamming/friction in your bowden tube or hotend? I would try removing the brass nozzle and pushing some of the nylon filament through your machine by hand, in an attempt to assess the amount of resistance your filament is experiencing. If it seems hard to move through, I would then further try to isolate the problem by separating the hotend from the bowden and trying again. I would then either replace the offending bowden with a larger ID tube (Mcmaster stocks several options - check the replacing bowden tube thread for P/N's) or expand the ID of the offending hotend with a 3.2-3.4mm drill. If that doesn't seem to be the problem... it could be that your hotend isn't calibrated correctly and the temperature is way too low?

I believe that this is normal, and as long as they stay under 100°C-ish you are doing OK.

How has this gone? I'd like to add a heated bed to one machine and this seems like the simplest solution.

Printing in ABS is really sweet with this hotend. We're getting great prints in ABS without a heated bed or anything fancy and we're using the print cooling fan to get awesome overhang quality. The trick seems to be printing it at around 280° - hot enough to get stellar layer adhesion despite using a cooling fan, and hot enough that the first layer of ABS bonds to the acrylic build platform and parts stick. It is important to get that first layer adequately smeared, however. Honestly, it's hard getting the prints off of the bed at all... Still working on that part.

Just signed up. Psyched to see everyone! Maybe I'll bring some of this silver PLA with for a handout. Honestly, though, it's probably going to be too much of a schlep.

I believe Rhino is the standard for the jewelry design industry, as well as many other industries. I use it a lot for architecture and product design. With Grasshopper and other plugins, it is an extremely powerful parametric modeler. Not as useful as Solidworks for purely engineering related projects, but far more powerful when it comes to organic shapes and "digital" design.

This is unequivocally the case. Ultimaker recently upped the quality of their ships-with-the-machine-silver PLA (it's now sparklier, and prints a little better...) but it still prints much worse than Printbl colored PLA. (To be fair, I haven't tried the Printbl Silver - it may just be that all silver PLA prints like garbage!) I think they are doing themselves a major disservice, because so many of my initial concerns about the possible part quality of the machine had nearly nothing to do with my assembly or the machine's capability - they were almost entirely related to quality of the PLA. We've essentially realized that if something we are printing is worth the time on our machine to print, it isn't worth the risk, hassle, and quality hit that comes from using the stock silver PLA. In other news... anyone in the NYC area interested in purchasing 3 mostly complete rolls of silver PLA?

Here are the relevant settings from our go-to nylon profile. If I were printing smaller things with more jumps I would probably drop the print speed 10-15mm/s and drop the nozzle temp 5-10°: layer_height = .15 wall_thickness = 2 retraction_enable = True solid_layer_thickness = 3 fill_density = 100 nozzle_size = 0.4 print_speed = 50 print_temperature = 255 support = None platform_adhesion = Brim filament_diameter = 2.88 filament_flow = 100.0 retraction_speed = 30 retraction_amount = 4.5 retraction_min_travel = 1.5 retraction_combing = True retraction_minimal_extrusion = 0.5 bottom_thickness = 0.3 object_sink = 0 travel_speed = 150.0 bottom_layer_speed = 15 infill_speed = 50 cool_min_layer_time = 6 fan_enabled = False skirt_line_count = 4 skirt_gap = 20

I have a machine that is set up to print in 645 exclusively and we get pretty consistently great results. Some tips: 1) Your prints look fuzzy because the filament is spending too much time in the nozzle. You probably need to increase your extrusion rate. Also, this material does not like lots of small hops, since a section of filament will then spend a lot of time heating up in the nozzle before finally being extruded. Don't waste your time drying the material - we keep ours exposed to air and get solid, smooth prints every day. The only time we get foamyness is on the first few mm of filament in the skirt of each print, because the previously pre-heated nylon has absorbed a lot of water while molten. 2) Your filament is probably clogging because the diameter of the Nylon is too large. I haven't tried printing 645 on a fully stock machine - our "nylon machine" is a stock machine on which I've opened up the ID of the entire hotend assembly with a 3.4mm drill, and replaced the bowden tube with a thin-walled equivalent to give more clearance for the filament. We have never had a clog with nylon. Anyway, our overall experience is that nylon isn't a particularly pretty material to print in, and it isn't a particularly great material for small/detailed prints, but it is an extremely useful material - it's strength, flexibility, and toughness enable amazingly high-functioning parts that totally transform what 3D printers are capable of.