Nicolinux

@Markus: Yes, this issue appeared over time. @Dim3nsioneer: But if it were underextrusion wouldn't I also have it on the outer shell? Like this here: I measure the filament diameter in different spots (unspooling a few metres) and using the average. I also did the extruder calibration once (with the first UM2) and it was pretty good. By the way, the cylinder test was printed with colorFabb at 220°. New material, new headaches

Very clever Aaron! It looks very nice (want!) Now combine it with a smaller third plate where only the circuitry+battery resides, use the pause_at_z plugin to place the plate on the already printed one, continue the print and you'd have a seamless object

I was too quick to judge this effect. Apparently if the flat area is big enough, the problem will start to sho from the second layer on. And I thought I'd be safe if I would print curved objects, but that's not the case :sad:

Shurik, this could just be bad luck. If the filament thickens in one spot and won't pass the teflon piece in the head - you'd get underextrusion. I have the feeling that there are a million possible causes for underextrusion and only a few of them are under your control (like not doing something stupid that prevents the extruder from feeding filament). But I agree, I have more prints that were ruined by underextrusion than for any other reason.

So I guess I don't have to take the z-stage apart (not very psyched to do either...).

Not sure. I'll have to babysit the print to see. But fromy my observations so far, the first two layers are perfect, then the strands start to drift apart and on the sixt layer (1.2 top/bottom thickness set in Cura) they are about 0.2mm apart and stay like this.

Forgot to mention - the big rods are oily. The piece of tape barely stuck

Good idea. Thanks for the hints. I checked the screws - none of the four are missing (and the 8 screws for the big rods are also in place).

The space between the lines increase with z-height. The first two layers are tight, then the lines start to drift apart. I specified the correct filament diameter but other there's nothing else to fiddle with. Well there is, but I don't like playing with the flow parameter.

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Ok, I applied sweing machine oil to the x/y axis and checked the short belts again. Made sure they were al dente with matching tension and tightened the motor screws down like there's no tomorrow. And all I got was this lousy cube:

Ok, another update. I did play around with Printrun/Pronterface and things look grim :/ There seems to be significant play with my z-stage. Check out this short video: I used printrun to move the bed around and after homing the z-axis and entering "G0 Z0", that's where the bed was at: No way this would touch the nozzle... I then moved the head around (by hand), alternating between Z30, Z0.1 and Z0. On the left side I have this with Z0: And on the right side: And the thing that sucked most - when I tried Z0 at the center I got the optimal distance from bed/nozzle (none...) So my z-stage shifts around for whatever reason. I checked for loose screws or other oddities but didn't find anything. By the way, if you use Printrun, don't forget to home the z-axis first or else it won't accept any gcode instructions regarding z-movement.

I hope so too. Never printed with colorFabb but I can't wait to fix my printer issues since I have a very sexy http://colorfabb.com/fluorescent-green spool here to play with

@LeoDDC: colorFabb has a new "learning" section on their site. There are a few sample objects with print settings: http://learn.colorfabb.com But layer height of 0.02? Isn't it a bit extreme? I haven't printed below 0.05, but when I did, I remember the prints to be very "hairy" - lots of very thin strands even on flat surfaces. Also the Cura tooltip for infill speed (advanced settings) indicates that it can impair print quality if set differently from the overall speed. Another thing to try.

Good to hear Ian. So you are moving to Bavaria then? Munich is a very nice city...

I guess this was a bug from an earlier version, or at least gcode generation was handled differently. I had gcode with 14.03-TEST ten times the size when compared to 14.01.

Hey Didier, nice cam holder. But I have to ask - doesn't it shake too much while printing? Does it impar image/video quality?

My extrusion tests start to fail at 7mm^3/s and I always hear the extruder skipping. However I have seen underextrusion occasionally where the extruder didin't skip. I think the later indicates some kind of clog or another issue not related to the extruder.

Just a little question. Do you guys use a 3d mouse with Zbrush or is it superfluous? (http://www.3dconnexion.com/products/spacemousewireless.html).

Just kidding, don't take this seriously. I do not imply that the Mac is superior hardware wise. It is just the complete package that's better than a PC. I do also have a gamping pc and I am very glad that I can swap pieces out when I want to upgrade. But I have to use Windows and this sucks. But that's ok for starting games.

Ohh, the flame war starts to shape nicely. @Robert: Have you looked at the Macbook Pro's specs lately? This is a monster machine. No need for a punny PC made of non matching pieces...

@Sander: I hope some of the Mac love reaches Daid too. He seems to have a rather cold relationship with Mac OSX...

You'd need to find someone with some expensive dishes... But do you really need the top model? You should max out the RAM (always!) but other than that... If you can live with 256GB SSD, then you'd have to wash fewer dishes

Don't forget to grab a Macbook Pro on your way out of the store

I hate ambiguous sans serif fonts...