tommyph1208

To me it actually looks like you have a levelling issue with your bed... IE. it is not perfectly flat, and so in the "underextruded" areas the bed came too close to the nozzle, caused too much resistance for the plastic to flow and the feeder started grinding your filament. Did you try lowering the bed and just asking the printer to extrude an amount of plastic to see if it flows smoothly?

Checking if the feeder is the problem is pretty easy... just bring the hotend to specified temp for your material of choice and push some filament through by hand... Is this doable? Does the filament flow out of the nozzle in a nice uniform little string? If yes, then your hotend is fine and its your feeder you have to start working on. If you can't push filament through by hand, neither can your feeder, and so your hotend must be the problem.

Is this one a "plug and play" upgrade. What else does one need to do to install this heat bed upgrade? I have it, but didn't use it as plug and play, so can't say if it will work with no other alternations than a bigger power supply (you WILL need that, since the one that comes with the UM only just about delivers enough power for the printer itself). I bought a RUMBA electronics board when upgrading my printer and stepped everything on the printer up to 24V rather than the std. 19V...That is a bigger operation, and probably not something you are interested in. If you want to try the cheapest route possible it would be to buy a 19-24V 20A power supply and a kit like the one linked. Follow the manuals/instructions provided by these Chinese retailers on how to alter the UM board so it works with a heatbed (they go something lioke this: http://www.916sy.com/ebay/Appbuck/hotu_1) ... IF this should fail, you buy a Ramps 1.4 board as a replacement... Its cheap (<10$) and works just as well as the Ultimaker one.

A heated bed and a glas plate or similar will do wonders for you... Ultimaker has a kit nowadays, and you can find much cheaper alternatives on eg. ebay like: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Heated-Bed-Kit-Aluminium-Plate-with-Temperature-Sensor-for-Ultimaker-3D-Printers-/221520299135?hash=item3393a3847f:g:rKgAAOSwVFlT6Jd1

One side good vs. the other one clumsy is almost always due to print cooling... Since your machine already has two fans, you need to first check if they bot run and about equally good... if not, replace the fan. Meanwhile, you can orient the difficult parts of your model towards the side where cooling works best.

How does the bend of your bowden tube look when the printhead is towards the back of the machine vs. when it is in front? Could it be that the bowden is a bit too long and has a bigger bend in that position causing more friction? Dosn't explain why it would happen suddenly with otherwise well functioning machines though...

I always fine tune bed leveling as the first layer is being laid down... knobs for adjustment are under the bed, so no risk of getting your hand run over by a speeding printhead... works a treat. I usually have 5 lines of skirt or brim as well, so this allows me to adjust while these are printing, meaning that I have perfect flow and leveling once the bottom layer of the actual object starts printing.

There is no logical reason why it shouldn't be possible (within reasonable size additions of course) but... You would probably be better off just building a machine from scratch, borrowing ideas from the ultimaker design (or even directly altering the design files that are available as open source on GitHub). While you would be able to keep motors, feeder, hotend etc. of an UMO (a lot of the components not directly related/attached to the axis) a conversion like the one you mention would as a minimum require new smooth rods, new belts, new frame, new build platform and possibly wires and bowden tube that would now not be long enough to reach out to the extends of the printer. Modifying the opensource drawings (eg. extending the front, back and build platform pieces to fit a longer x axis) having those lasercut and ordering parts to fit will be a bit time consuming, but will end up being as cheap (or cheaper) than a used UMO and I don't think it would be more difficult when it comes to the assembly part.

Could it be that the "handle part" (melted part) is slow to print so the head spends a lot of time over that position and thus melts it? You do seem to have a lot of extra heat cartridge sticking out... What happens if you rotate the model 180 degrees around the z axis and print again with same settings?

I am not a teacher, but did spend a year on the teachers education in denmark before opting out and choosing University instead. I have done teaching both as intern during that year and as a full time substitute. I will try to answer your questions, and also add a bit of extra comments. 1. The main problem for students will not be on the software side of making 3d printable files... There are so many tools available today from very simple "doodleing" to highly advanced CAD and anything in between... Cura can even load simple .jpeg .bmp. .png drawings and extrude them to something printable (though the result may be questionable). The problem will be on the hardware side, maintaining, adjusting etc. the printer... That part is probably best left to the teacher, or at least a smaller group of interested students under teacher supervision. 2. I never used 3d printing in teaching, but from my experience with anything teaching related I can easily see your biggest problem being time. 3d printing takes A LOT of time... And with kids typically designing fairly crude, non-optimized models, a single print will easily take an hour or more... Now imagine 20 students each wanting their object printed. It simply cannot be done like that in a live teaching session. So either the students will have to submit their print to have it printed in between sessions or maybe over night (that means unattended printer at the school which is probably not allowed), its also a shame because it takes away a big part of the fascinating aspects of 3d printing - seeing the object actually being made. An approach could be study groups of 3-4 students pr. group and some restrictions on estimated print time/material use etc. This lets the students experiment with various ways of reducing these aspects (simpler design, cruder details in slicing, less infill, etc.) 3. Again, I have never administered a school, but I think a lot of the same aspects as with other creative and "experiment" based school couses (woodshop, physics, chemestry etc.) apply, there is some (fairly expensive equipment to be bought, teachers need to know how it works, how to maintain it, how to order materials etc. for it. And there is the safety of the children and staff... Finding a teacher that either already has knowledge about the printer or a personal interest in the field is a huge plus... That teacher having the possibility of eg. bringing the printer home to mess around with in his or her spare time could also be a way of gaining some expertise outside of expensive courses and hours. I think for it to work you HAVE to still keep the "maker approach" in mind, meaning a teacher has to be able to unclog a nozzle or replace a ptfe tube himself without relying on some expensive service agreement. Just my 10 cents

Hey Glenn, you are missing some very basic info in your post that will make it easier for people to help you... Like: What printer are you using? Did you modify it in any way? Do you have pictures of your problem?

great tip Tommy much thanks... my glass has just shattered with a Polymaker PC-plus print so I know exactly what you are talking about. Any chance of a link to the fiberplate you are using... there seems to be a few different types... P.S. I've also just ordered some Wolfbite Mega to give it a try. I don't have a link no... It was sold to me by a private person in a FB group... My impression is that they used the stuff at where the guy worked, so he got it from there...

I think you are right, either about belt tension or tension of the grub screws on your pulleys... All those little dots mean a lot of travel moves, and missing just a single step on your motor, the slightest slip or play in your pulleys or belts, will result in some artifacts on such small details. I would suggest trying to tighten those things up, and maybe lower your travel speed a bit (don't know what it is at now) You can also try some z-lift when doing travel moves, to make sure your nozzle doesn't collide with the very small and intricate bolt-pillars.

1+ on BuildTak being not the magical solution that it is put out to be... I tried it and pretty much the first large print I made stuck so well, the BuildTak got destroyed in the attempt to remove the piece (and salvage the glass plate that it was stuck to). I had some discussions about it in a FB group, and the consensus seemed to be that it worked really well once you nailed the leveling... TBH, I think that requirement makes it not worth its pricetag, especially when failing to level in the magic distance required for a good BuildTak print, means you ruin the (pretty expensive) sheet, your print, and possibly the surface the BuildTak was attached to. I have had pretty good results with water-diluted PVA glue (wood glue) on glass, heat up the bed and let it vaporize the water, leaving just a thin coat of glue. However, if you make the glue solution too strong, you end up in pretty much the same scenario as with the BuildTak, where you can't get the print off. I destroyed a few glass plates, where the print actually took pieces of glass with, it once it finally let go (this happed both with me prying the print, AND with it popping off by itself in the freezer). I have now gone onto something I bought from a guy in the previously mentioned FB group, that he called "fiberplade" (fibre plate), from what I can tell it is (or at least is very similar to) the material you use to make PCBs with... That is, the epoxy based material that the etched copper sits on, however it just came without any copper and cut to size. After sanding it lightly, it is so far the best print surface I have used, and also has some flex in it, so you can pop off prints easier than with eg. a glass plate.

Ah yes... The good old claim that E3D hotends cant print PLA... Heard that plenty too I don't know what to tell you... I printed tons of PLA through my E3Ds and never had problems with that... The best I can tell, from what I have read from people who claim to have trouble, is that it comes down to assembly errors. E3D have some pretty specific but very clear (and not that complex) instructions on how to assemble their hotends, and these have to be followed, to the letter... after that, its smooth sailing. Most commonly, I think people miss/skip/fail the step of heating up the newly assembled hotend to ~270 degrees and tightening the nozzle while hot to form a good seal against the heatbreak. That... And improper cooling of the heatsink.

I use 3 mm. (technically, its 2.85), as it is the default ultimaker size, so I didn't have to fiddle with a new 1.75mm., feeder and what else might be required to switch filament thickness. I also use bowden yes... Again, it is simpler than switching to a direct feed (and the UM machines, really are made for light non-bulky printheads... its some of what it does best)

Hey, certainly, I'd be glad to help and tell/show you what I did, then you can make up your mind if this is the route you want to go or not... For starters here are a few pictures from my rebuild album: Would you perfer (maybe we should be) moving it to a PM discussion, rather than thread-hijacking?

The initial support is there for dual extrusion on the UM2 board (extra heater output, extra stepper driver for Feeder, extra temp sensor input), so I would also just go ahead and try... If you are concerned about the power needed, you could go with the Cyclops instead, it would be easier to set up in alot of ways (less wireing, temp control, nozzle alignment and offset etc.), but of course comes with the drawback of not being able to control temperatures of each nozzle seperately, as well as probably the need for more purging in-between material shifts to not mix them too much.

Don't cut holes in them, they are too nice looking for that If you want to, you could get some laser cut acrylic sheets and fit those instead... it should be very easy to find the drawings for the frame of the machine on GitHub (they are open source by now), modify them to your liking (draw a cutout in the centre of the side panels) and send the drawings off to a laser cutting service to have them made in 6mm. acryliic.

I think it does yes, obviously your machine will never be completely silent, but after switching to SilentStepSticks from Watterot and changing to |Robert|s feeder, I think fans are now what make the most noise on my UMO.

I went with the |Robert| feeder on my UMO, primarily because of the noise the original one makes especially with retractions. I just have it mounted with an adapter like the one @gr5 links to so it is still almost as bulky as the original... If you want to mount the motor inside the printer (I had the same idea, and find it really neat), I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to do so... The machine is wood after all, so easy to modify... Drill 4 x Nema17 spaced 3 mm. holes in the back of your printer where there is nothing on the inside (probably below the left side/y axis motor) and drill/cut a hole in the middle of them for the stepper axis, then mount the Roberts feeder on the outside with the stepper on the inside, like on the UM2. You might need a new bowden cable and extended wires since the feeder would sit a little lower than the original, but those are cheap parts to replace.

This is heavy under extrusion... you can probably fix it by printing slower, warmer and maybe tightening the feeder.

The main argument to go for eg. a E3Dv6 as you mention, which is a all-metal hotend, is the increased operating temperature range which will allow you to print different materials, especially some that require higher temperatures to extrude properly, than what your normal Ultimaker Hotend (and its non-metal components) can handle. I also find my E3D hotends to (once assembled correctly) be more reliable than my old UMO hotend ever was, less clogging, easier maintenance etc. Then there is their very large (and still growing) variety of hotend types, nozzle types and sizes, fixtures, wrappings and what-not, that make their products super slick and versatile. I now have several different hotends from E3D (a normal v6 with a large variety of nozzles from 0.25 to 0.8 mm., a vulcano hotend with a variety of nozzles from 0.8 to 1.2 mm., and a v5 that I keep as spare), swapping between them and their nozzles is quick and painless, and lets you do more things with your printer. That said, It did take a bad reocurring clog in my original hotend for me to do the switch to E3D, but I have not looked back since.

Did you check the wires?

Haha, lol... I just downloaded 2.1.3 to have a look and you are right, can't seem to find settings for the printer anywhere... Seems like you are forced to selecting a predefined profile... Bye Bye custom printers, upgrades etc... Silly