hieronymus

Ah, I see. Seems like I had a limited understanding of the spiralize feature. I had always just adjusted the wall thickness to the nozzle-diameter, thinking that it would override it to that value anyway. Seems that by increasing the wall-thickness I may have more success in making things watertight, thanks.

Hi Arjan, I recently got my hands on some XT clear and was already aware that XT can be quite temperature-critical to print. Looks like i'm going to have to do some testing of my own, only have a 0.4 nozzle though. Nice to see some examples of the difference that different temps and cooling give. Just a note: As I understand it, the spiralize function in Cura overrides the input for the shell-thickness. So if I'm not mistaken, all your tests would have generated G-code with a shell that is equal to your nozzle-diameter (in your case 0,8mm).

The silvery color of bauermakers first print is probably due to his choice of abrasive. Usually when using Aluminium or Stainless steel it leaves a silver finish (when polishing like this you're not only taking away a small amount of material of the surface of your piece, but also slightly degrading your abrasive material, which leaves a residue on your piece.) also, congrats on your 'leet' number of posts

Yeah, it's 'Margo' from the new production company 'Bold Machines' that Bre Pettis (I still feel strangely betrayed whenever I come across his name...) is heading now he stepped down as CEO of Makerbot. They have released the models for 2 of their characters now (on Thingiverse, obviously): Margo Mr. Walthersnap (The villian). and according to their blog they will be providing more models in the weeks to come. They seems nicely modelled and all are already broken up in individual parts and optimized for build orientation, I was rather impressed. Haven't had the time to look at them for long, but looking at the biggest parts, it seems possible to print all parts at 200% size. When I have time they may be just what I need to finally start 'brushing up' on my airbrush and painting skills.

The endstop I mentioned is the little black block that's glued to the side of the case (in your pictures it's behind the metal bar). This is a limit-switch and there is another one in the same corner glued tot the roof of the printer; normally as the carriage is moving in a certain direction the printer needs to know when the edge of the buildplate has been reached so it can stop. This is when the limit-switch is pressed and at that point the motor should stop turning. The metal arm (/clicker) is supposed to be straight, however in your pictures the top part is bent, (If you check, the other limit-switch on your printer is probably still straight), that's why I have a feeling the carriage ran into the switch but didn't manage to stop the motor. In theory, the motor still excerting force on the belt as one side of that belt is fixed in place, could slightly stretch the belt which would increase it's lenght. A non-functioning endstop could have several reasons (faulty switch itself, problem/ loose connection in the wiring) but I'm not really all that up to speed with the UM2's wiring-diagram so I can't really help there. A well functioning (and straight) endstop should make a distinct 'click' when you press it (check with the one glued to the roof) so you could try bending back the metal arm until it is straight and then press it to hear the clicking sound. If it doesn't click it's probably a faulty limit-switch and you would need a new one, if it does click (but was unale to stop the motor) it's probably the wiring, but perhaps Illuminarti can help with that. Hope all of that made sense

The metal arm from the endstop looks awfully bent, did you do this yourself to correct some alignment issues? If not, it probably means the whole carridge simply smashed into it without stopping the motor. Could the continued running of the motor have streched the belt? (since the lower part of the belt is somewhat fixed inside that black slider-block, pulling on one side could make it longer?) Not really sure, just putting it out there, I do agree with Illuminarti that the amount of play is quite substantial.

Alternatively, you could increase the Bottom/Top Thickness so it would have more layers to eventually fill the final top layer: Say your using a layer-height of 0,2. A Bottom/Top Thickness of 0,8 would mean creating 4 solid layers at a local highpoint of the print. The first layer wil sag and string severely, the second one would have little to build apon but more so than the first, same goes for the third and finaly you'd have to hope by the forth layer it will be solid and flawless. Increasing the Bottom/Top Thickness to 1,2 would give it 2 extra layers to even out the surface. I've been amazed at how well some large tops of prints have been successful, even with 0% infill at times, by simply increasing the thickness of the top. (Pity you can only specify a value for both bottom and top and not separate, as this technique is usually only needed at the top, making bottoms unnecessarily heavy sometimes).

IIRC, the default height for the fan to be full on is 5,0mm, under the expert settings, I'm only 99% sure since I have been playing around with a lot of settings for the past couple of weeks so I may have changed this without me realising, but I'm almost certain the fanspeed scales linear to 100% at 5,0mm. I think it's along those lines. I haven't looked at the g-code that much, but what I found during prinitng was this: My settings have the fan start at 0 on layer 1 to 100% at height 5,0mm (usually this is layer 50 because I tend to print at 0,1mm). So after say 3mm of printing if I go into the 'Tune' menu, under fan speed it would say 60% and I can then change that up or down to my liking for that layer, but at the start of the next layer my manual input will be overridden (because that's in the g-code). Only after reaching those 5,0mm (and the fan being permanently on full) will any manual adjustments be permanent (nolonger overridden at the start of the next layer).

Ah, I see, well never mind then, in the case of one-off's and exclusive designs printing them directly seems the to be the best option, I just wish I had any experience printing flexible materials for any further advice.

I have never tried any flex-PLA's before, so I don't have any advice on printing with flex-PLA, however if commercial work or bulk production are your intent, why not print in regular PLA, make a mold of your PLA part and then use that mold to cast dozens/hundreds of the part in flexible silicon. 3D-printing seems to me as a less likely tool in producing bulk (it's strenghts lie in prototyping, one-off's and small production runs), espescially when increased detail usually means longer printing times and therefore lower production capacity. Instead, you could print in normal PLA and crank up the quality on that single print (making it longer) and making a mold, but after that initial investment in time, al you had to do is refill that mold every 45 - 60 minutes with fast curing silicon and produce dozens a day instead of 2 or 3. Of course, wether an object is suitable for molding depends on it's complexity, but something like a (mostly flat) phone-case should be pretty straightforward. (Also I'm ruling out moving parts since that usually doesn't work with a flexible material anyway).

hehe, yeah that arc is a tricky one :smile: as with all overhangs the general rule is cool and slow, for a specific feature like that I usually go back to 25-30 mm/s printspeed and around 200C. Also manually increasing the fanspeed during those last couple of layers in which the overhang is most extreme (just before the two halves of the arc meet in the middle) may help, although if you cool too much (especially the nozzle) you might harden the plastic before it exits the nozzle which will at first start to lead to under-extrusion and eventually a clogg. So it's one of those interesting balancing-acts you're going to have to get a feel for. Also, in general, lowering the layer-height will make overhangs better, because the overhang approaches more gradually and it takes a steeper angle befor the entire width of the nozzle-diameter in a new layer is no longer supported by any layers beneith it. (Am I saying that right, steeper? or do I mean flatter?...not really sure if I'm explaining this all that well, anyway.....) If the rest of the torture test is going well or is at least to your satisfaction, you can further test your 'overhang-skills' :grin: without wasting time and filament by using this model: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:174611

I have the same versions of Cura and Marlin, and I also noticed that the LED Brightness settings are a bit wonky now. It's not that they don't work, it's just that they only activate once you cycle past them in the Menu on th UM2. A couple of days ago I set them to 50% brightness and as I did so, it changed on the fly. A day later, after a power-cycle, I noticed the LED's were on full and only as I cycled past the option "Led Brightness" in the Tune menu during a print, did the LED's immediatly change back to 50%. Didn't even have to open the option, just cycle past it. So it seems any changes that are made are saved, even after a power-cycle, but they aren't immediatly activated. I haven't changed back to a previous version (of both Cura and/or Marlin) so I don't know wheter this behaviour is new or not.

Hehe, I had the same thing happening to me. I recieved my UM2 last Friday and was also surprised to only find the MiniCalTest.gcode on the SD-card. After I mentioned it in my feedback mail, Sander apologized, seems like a small hickup in the calibration department, after calibrating they forgot to replace their calibrating-SD card with the customer version. Still, I knew Cura came with that friendly little robot, so before moving forward, first thing I did was copy it to the SD card. It may be weird, but it kind of....felt...right, that my first print was that friendly blue robot that's now sitting, smiling quietly, on my desk :grin:

I apologize if my previous post implied that 'water soluable' meant dipping it in water would wash a support material right off. As Daid very accurately described, trying to solve a plastic like that is basically like untangling the spaghetti. (breaking up the polymer into many loose monomers). What your left with, is going to be 'snotty' mess who's viscosity depends on the ratio of plastic and amount of water used. I'm glad to hear that running it under a tap appears to be sufficiant to remove the slurry, although perhaps a more thorough aproach may be needed for hard to reach/flush places (Flushing out 'internal' support through a small hole in the bottom for instance). The magnetic stirrer mentioned by Burki also sprang to mind from my days in the chemistry labs, although that may be best at circulating water around the outside of the print, not affecting the inside / hard to reach places. An Ultrasonic Cleaner / bath (like the ones they use to clean jewelry) may be up to the task to reach everywhere, but I'm unsure whether the vibrations from one of those are capable of imparting heat into the print, which could soften it and defeat it's purpose. (I remember using them for a brief time when I was casting dentures and dental prostheses, but the ones we had also had a heating element to bring the water up to a certain temperature, so the fact that they came out hot to the touch doesn't really tell me anything). All that being said, the water itself poses no danger to either PLA, ABS or Nylon for that matter (it's only the temperature that may pose a problem), so a 'water soluable' material still has a lot of potential.

I've always been a fan of combining any dark grey / black with very vibrant yellow accents. It always remainds me of those industrial looking safety rails with the slanted black and yellow bands but in this case it also has a 'BumbleBee-thingy' look going for it, which should work well since it's going to be buzzing with productivity like any good worker-bee should :-P (I appologise if I come of as rambling, I just recieved some very happy news : Dear Customer, Your order has been shipped ============================== Shipment Summary ============================================================ ultimaker-2-eu Ultimaker 2 Power cord: EU 9030 PLA Silver-Grey PLA Silver-Grey ============================================================ Thank you for your business. I'm afraid I won't be able to wipe this grin of my face for the rest of the night :grin: )

Only a couple of days ago, Daid revealed a little nugget of information in this thread: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/3989-new-makerbot-models/&do=findComment&comment=31817 Even though it doesn't give any specific information on the material, it's pricing or availlability, it looks like Ultimaker is also pushing forward on the material sciences part of things. Keep in mind, the true power of a water soluable material (like PVA or this new material Ultimaker is working on) is as an easily removable support material. As such, it would only make sense when used in conjuction with a dual extrusion setup. If I understand correctly there are only a limited number of dual extrusion UM1's operational at the moment (most who experimented with it eventualy went back to a single extruder for the moment) and according to Sander in this post: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/3255-ultimaker²-lead-time-update/?p=31677 the dual extrusion extension kit for UM2 is still a couple of months away, so it looks like news for this new material may be sparse for the next couple of months. So for now, it looks like we'll have to be patient (which, I know, is a horrible word ), but great things may be up ahead.

I've only used it once or twice in the past, but judging from the UI-Interface it's 'Google SketchUp'. It uses an 'Illustrative' style of view-port (desaturated colors, different line-weights for outlines and silhouettes of features/details) which gives the 2D 'Sketch' feel Aaron recognised. It's quite a popular modeling software, especially because it has a free consumer version and is touted as having the lowest threshold of entrance for those who are new to 3D-modeling. But for more complex modeling tasks it may feel a bit lacking for those used other truly parametric modeling suites like Solidworks, Inventor or Spaceclaim. Still, I've seen some really impressive projects done in SketchUp and 0235's Star Citizen Spaceship looks great, can't wait to see the combined finished print. (And, I'm hoping, a complete paintjob, I mean it has a lot of individual details which will take a lot of time to paint, but will probably end up wonderfull.) Also, perhaps design a custom base for the spaceship to sit on so it gets some alleviation.