saulbass1

gr5 - you may well be right about this - personally I try to avoid the final - 'removing the nozzle stage', if I can, as I find the whole drill / burning flame thing a bit of a performance - especially as I can't get the drill head in position with the nozzle in place - hence the taking apart phase above. I guess I should try to find a reliable manual way (i.e. spanner) to remove the nozzle - it just gets a great deal trickier when the thing is hot - two sets of pliers are needed along with ideally a second pair of hands. Plus there's the problem of getting the nozzle back in the aluminium thread perfectly - not so easy to do I find - a big drill helps here for some reason. FWIW - I've had so many problems with clogging that I ended up knackering both the brass nozzle and the aluminium block. Replacing the block was a big hassle especially removing the heater cartridge. While I am a fan of the Ultimaker 1 design - I do think an easier way is needed to clear all these frequent nozzle blockages. I would be interested to know if the UM2 design makes this any easier....

My Ultimaker De-Clogging Nozzle Guide I've had my Ultimaker One for over 6 months now and have had a clogged nozzle on four or five occasions. To be honest it's been a pain to clear it. I've looked at the following guides and have found them helpful: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/1932-new-user-tremendous-clogging-problems/page-2 http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/2463-nozzle-failure/ http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/1447-troubleshooting-ultimaker-hot-end-because-of-plugging/ http://wiki.ultimaker.com/Jamming http://www.tridimake.com/2012/10/clean-hotend-and-nozzle.html'>http://www.tridimake.com/2012/10/clean-hotend-and-nozzle.html'>http://www.tridimake.com/2012/10/clean-hotend-and-nozzle.html'>http://www.tridimake.com/2012/10/clean-hotend-and-nozzle.html https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ultimaker/ix459VR2mHI I’ve tried the 'hot pin/needle' technique but this was a pain as I had to manually file down a needle with wet and dry paper and I also manged to damage the tip of the nozzle. I should mention that is it worth trying some of the approaches above especially heating the hotend to 250C and manually extruding filament through the hotend - but if you've got a grain of sand or other material stuck in the nozzle then heating the hotend to 250C isn't going to solve the problem. I have devised a set of procedures which I would like to share - in part based on some of the procedures noted above. First you will need to get together the following tools. 1 set of pliers 1 plumbers gas torch 1 10mm socket for an electric drill. Make sure you use a very low torque setting otherwise you will thread the aluminium block - uber pain to replace. A short offcut of un-extruded PLA filament - 20cm will do. Next, heat the hotend to 200C and then partially dismantle it so that the existing filament can be removed. Any spare filament in the PEEK can be pushed out with a suitable sized wooden stick ( I use a barbecue stick) or nail as suggested by http://www.tridimake.com/2012/10/clean-hotend-and-nozzle.html If after this you still have a clogged nozzle and you can't see daylight through the nozzle then you will need to remove the nozzle. No daylight visible? - time to remove the nozzle. I found the best way was to use a 10mm socket in an electric drill and a pair of pliers to hold the aluminium block. This is easier if the hotend is at 200C. Once you've removed the brass nozzle, the next stage is to heat it vigorously, burning off the blockage inside. Hold the brass nozzle using the pliers and play the torch flame over it for 2 or 3 minutes until the blockage has burnt away. Being careful not to touch the very hot nozzle, check if light is visible through the hole in the nozzle - if not, repeat heating with the torch and maybe heat for a little longer. Once the blockage has burnt away you will see some light through the nozzle. The next stage is to ensure you have removed the burnt ash like reside from the inside of the nozzle. The best way I have found to do this is to cool the nozzle down in water and then reheat with the flame for approximately 10 seconds. Then push the offcut of PLA filament through the larger threaded end and keep pushing until you see a thin stream of filament oozing out of the nozzle tip. If not remove the PLA and repeat the heating process. Now to make sure absolutely no residue from the heating/burning is left inside, pull the solidifying PLA back out of the nozzle. The trick here is to get the nozzle/PLA to right temperature - this is difficult as the nozzle is no longer inside the Ultimakers heating assembly so there is no way to check this accurately. My approach was to cool the nozzle/PLA in water again. Now the PLA will be solid and it shouldnt' be possible to pull it out. The next stage is to gently heat the nozzle - a few seconds in the flame should do. If you make sure you don't overheat the nozzle/PLA at this time, you ought to able to pull the entire PLA stub out in one go. See photo below where all the burnt residue and filament inside the entire nozzle component has come out in one piece. Check the nozzle against the light. If you can see a clear circular hole, then congratuations - you've cleaned your nozzle. Be careful when reassembling the nozzle in the aluminium block to make sure it goes in at a straight 90 degrees - otherwise you run the risk of damaging the aluminium block. I would suggest heating the brass nozzle for 10 seconds in the flame again before screwing back into the assembly. Take care at all times to handle the nozzle with a pair of pliers or wear proper gloves - otherwise you will burn your fingers.

Afraid that I too suffer from frequent MAXTEMP errors. Mine is a pre-built machine and I waited/lost a month earlier this year trying to get it fixed by support. Since then I get this error every few weeks - randomly but it's a lost night and once again so much lost material... shame really. Perhaps when engineering have got the shiny UM2 out they might look at ways to fix this common fault.

Hi, Just to add to this: I've been trying to place an order in the UM shop since 25th Oct some 12 days ago - apart from a brief note from support saying that they are busy elsewhere I've heard nothing at all about my order. I've lodged tickets with the online ticketing as well as direct emails. The monies have been taken. What is happening to the UM shop? - presently it feels like UM decided to abandon their existing customers all in favour of maximal press profile etc etc. Please remember that your existing customers are also very busy on their projects and need your support to continue working with our printers. Parts need to be sent out to customers quickly and efficiently. It should be a priority. Please can someone sort this out ASAP.

Thanks for such a quick reply!! I can't tell you how much grief this has been giving me - it never occurred to me to push the collar down..

Hi, This might seem like a dumb question but how do I release the bowden tube from the extruder mechanism? I've tried pulling it up using pliers - it seems well stuck and I don't want to break anything... Also I have a similar problem at the other end, I can't pull the bowden up out of the printhead - I have to disassemble the printhead, and pull the bowden down and out of the mechanism - all of which takes time to then reassemble - if there was a quick way to release it and lift it up and out of the printhead that would be great. ( It's a pre-assembled printer so I've not gone through the process of assembling it and I can't find any posts asking the same question.) Many thanks,

Guys, thanks for the replies which have helped me understand some of the operating tolerances of my printer - I wasn't sure if it was operating to specification. I'd previously thought that the Z axis would be the limiting resolution of the Ultimaker but gr5's explanation about the 0.2mm radiusing makes perfect sense, not withstanding the 12.5 micron positioning. The suggestion to print a raft is good except I'm not wanting to have a raft in this case. Cheers.

Hi, Thanks for the quick responses. I reprinted the object using 'normal' non flexible Ultimaker PLA at 0.1mm layer thickness and as you can see from the attached image the corners are tighter in comparison with the flexible PLA. In both cases the interior corners are sharper than the exterior corners. I've uploaded the source file to thingiverse for reference if anyone is interested: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:139777 Owen - good idea - once I reload the flexible PLA I will try some lower temperatures... gr5 - the test piece is only 1mm thick and as this new image shows, the top and bottom layers look similar in terms of profile. As for my leveling technique - I normally stick a thin sheet of paper under the nozzle and shift the printhead from corner to corner until it just grips the paper in all four positions. I then check this by watching how thick the filament lines are as the brim is printed - making fine adjustments on the fly so that the PLA just 'digs' into the blue tape. I think this technique is a good one as you have time to see how the PLA squishes out or begins to lift if the bed is uneven. While I'm not surprised the normal PLA prints tighter than the flexible PLA, overall I was expecting the Ultimaker prints to be a little 'sharper'. Is there anything I need to adjust? Everything feels pretty tight and the calibration Robots look good to me.

The picture above shows my flexible PLA print in comparison to my original data file. As you can see the corner radius of the 3D print is approx 0.8mm rather than the 0.2mm suggested. I have pasted my Cura settings. (The printer is a recent factory built machine in conjunction with Cura 13.06.4.) Does anyone have any ideas how to improve the quality of the print - which is a decal project? Cheers,

Hi, I'm printing some objects using flexible PLA (@ 15mm/s) and the prints corners look a bit rounded in the XY axis. Is there any way I can adjust my Cura settings to sharpen the XY resolution of my 3D prints? Cheers, Selected

Hi Daid, Really pleased with the performance and results I'm getting from 13.06. I have a feature request... Is there a way to have different infill amounts / support material densities for different sections of a single model - driven by polygon material colours. (I'm thinking .obj file import here). Sometimes I would like to be able to say to Cura - make this section solid/very dense while this section can be much less densly inflled - or to define a separate nested object as a support structure with specific density. This is particularly important with complex forms where sometimes Cura prints the support material in such a way that it is hard to differentiate between what is form and what is support - or where you want strong leg supports but lightly infilled upper body areas. I can imagine this might be a challenge to implement but it would really help with some prints... Thanks!

Got to agree - the latest Cura is amazing. Best prints ever. Thanks Daid!

Hi, Firstly let me say - this is a wonderful enhancement to the Ultimaker - thank you. I had a couple of thoughts. Firstly it would be useful to have a display layout that showed ALL the settings employed for a print - this is really useful in developing profiles and print settings. It also really needs to show the printed objects scale, translation, rotation and mirror settings so that if you are doing a multipart print, you have a reference of what these were so that all the parts will match. Presently Cura hides these which can be frustrating. This image link shows what I mean. Also it would be really helpful to have an autoname increment so that we can avoid overwriting SD card files - maybe nNAME678.xxx where n is the number of the file increment and NAME678 is the original STL/OBJ file originally loaded. xxx being whatever the suffix is for GCode files. Cheers, Saul