yellowshark

(Hmn well I have reposted my posting twice and it has disappeared – this is third attempt) Hi Sander thank you for the response - good to hear that email notifications are coming; I understand your point about getting Notifications generally clean before adding emails. Right now I am seeing the following notification bugs. I am still not getting advised of new threads added to a forum I am subscribed to. E.G. I have just checked the General thread and the most recent 12 threads (I stopped counting at that point) have not been notified to me. When I get a notification, and select it, I am taken to the first post/first page of the thread rather than the page that contains the new posting. I received a notification today that related to a post made two days ago; I had not seen this post before so receiving a notification was correct, but it was 2 days late! Right now, getting notifications of posts that were made weeks/months ago seems to have stopped

This post has appeared on the forum immediately so I assume my posting HAS disappeared.

Hi Sander, I have just replied to your post of a couple of days ago, but having hit the submit button my response seems to have disappeared into the ether - a known bug? I will resend the response again in 10/15 minutes

Ok I have bided my time a bit, after finally getting access to the forum, to try and find my way around a bit before commenting on this thread. I have been on the forum for 18 months+ and no doubt like many in that position, I started by asking questions but over time moved to helping other people. I have always been happy, if need be, to spend hours helping because I got so much help in my early days from this great forum. What I am not prepared to do though is to spend more hours trying to find new posts. I never browsed the forums – I used the email notification system – where has that gone!!!!!!!!! The bugs in the new Notifications code are legion, many already mentioned by others; I signed on yesterday and found 23/24 notifications. What a mess; I have no idea how much time I wasted following leads that had no updates and it is clear that the forums I have subscribed to are not generating notifications for everything that is posted to them. The end result is that you cannot help everyone unless you are prepared to manually investigate every forum for new questions/responses – which I am not. My participation, ultimately no doubt my interest, has taken a dive. I use my email system each day substantially and every time there was an email message from the forum I would normally immediately select it and have a look. Now it is several days before I sign on and if the notifications system carries on as it is then that will become weeks rather than days. I have been a professional software developer for many years, programming/designing/managing and if one of my teams had released the notifications software heads would have rolled, although I suspect I would have been the first to be let go.

As Robert says we need that information to help you specifically. Bear in mind that shrinkage is a complex subject with many variables affecting it. If we talk about shrinkage in percentage terms, then different materials will shrink differently. I am sure that the same material, e.g. PLA, from different manufacturers will shrink differently. I have a strong suspicion that even the same material from the same manufacturer, in a different colour, can shrink differently. Temperature affects it so you can, if not managed properly, get a different shrinkage when using a heated bed and not using a heated bed; the difference in temp. between the inside of the printing enclosure and the ambient temperature will be different. How quickly you remove your piece from the warm printer into your cold winter room will affect it. Geometry affects it. Your printer hardware will affect it. Ultimately testing and experience will help you get more accurate for your environment. One thing is for sure and that is that generally the slower you print the more accurate you will be.

@dim3nsioneer: Thanks for your clarification on the dual extruder aspect, much appreciated. Very fair comments on the open source position, companies pay for their software by the cost of their software development staff and expect (and pay for) a certain level of standards and it was probably unfair of me to make such a comparison. I do often forget that Cura is open source, thinking that it is owned and funded by Ultimaker (or maybe it is). I really know nothing about open source – a foreign world to me 8)

Lol I will take that as a sort of no/yes and a yes sometime then.

Hi did albums not get carried over to the new forum? I cannot find mine. If so, are they going to be carried over?

Lol well you hit the nail right on the head there. I was certainly hoping/anticipating that support for dual extrusion would be improved because I have dual extrusion! Without dual extrusion as it stands now, I will probably decide to stay on the old version unless there is something seriously good with PU that makes it worth using both versions, such as reduced print times or better surface quality. I can see where you are coming from on that one but having spent 10 years (excluding management) in software development for a major financial services company, we would never release software without existing functions, not improved maybe but not dropped. Unless you are phasing some old process out, you just do not do software that way. Anyway it is good to know it is imminent so we can have a play with it. I just hope it is not like the new forum which seems like a backward step in usability so far.

LOL you should move to the UK. We buy our petrol in litres and measure our fuel consumption in miles per gallon. We buy our wine in centilitres and our beer in pints. We buy our clothes in inches and our fabrics in metres. I think we buy our wood in inches and our kitchen cabinets in mm. No doubt something to do with our symbiotic relationship with our European partners

Hmn, not sure what the point is in releasing fancy new software if it is not as good as the old version! I use most of the functions on basic/advanced/expert tabs. Sounds like release 5 for me too

Hi can I add my request to this too Chin. I follow a variety of Ultimaker forums; each new thread sends me an email when it is started which I look at. If I am interested in the thread I follow it and an email is sent to me each time a new post is made. Or of course it used to! Like others here I neither have the time or desire to log on innumerable times during the day to see if there is anything interesting. More importantly I am following lots of threads so I can help people. I am happy to spend hours doing that. But I am not prepared to spend days going through who knows how many thousands of threads to see if was following them so I can continue helping people - I am sure there are lots of experienced guys in the same position. This is all insane. There may have been a thread alerting us to the closure of the forum and why, although I never saw it, but the process is awful. I have finally got on to the forum 10 days after the 21st April and now I get no notifications. Apart form getting everybody back on to the forum unless, I was the last, your next priority should be notifications otherwise the quality of this forum is going to dive to a miserable level. Is there a thread anywhere where I can read about the benefits of "upgrading the forum"? It sure does not feel like an "upgrade" at the moment :(

Well its good to be back guys I must admit from one perspective it has been good as I have ignored the computer almost totally for the past 10 days or whatever, apart from catching up on the UK election news; and as a result cleared a whole list of outstanding domestic jobs in the period. Not having a computer can be good for you, sometimes! I have no idea how many postings/new threads I have to catch up on but hope to clear them over the weekend. Yes I think we all missed each other

Hi I have just now got back on to the forum. I have yet to work out how to get access to my old messages; I remember reading about it just before the site went down. I was at the time in two conversations, one I recall was with someone in Bournemouth. If you posted anything to me before the forum went down can you please resend and I will respond!

Hi Graeme, well assuming your first layer settings are reasonable, like speed of 20mm/s and layer depth of .300 then your probable cause is the nozzle tip to bed distance. Play around with this, i.e. increase and decrease it and you should see it get better or worse with one of them. Pursue the change that improved it. I.E. if reducing the gap made it better then reduce it again until you get your best position.

Well the UM will certainly do a good job for you; I do not have a UM so have no vested interest in saying that!! I have never heard of ¼ scale, that seems awfully large! The biggest I have done is 1:100 scale- i.e. 1 inch of model = 100 inches of real life, which takes up most of the print bed. A ¼ of a door would not fit in the printer so I am guessing ¼ means something else and not one quarter. Be prepared to spend at least a solid month learning and practicing. If you can avoid lots of colours then whilst you are starting pick two colours and stick with those and get used to them – different colours can require different settings which will only cause you extra work whilst you are learning. Buy high quality filament; no doubt the American members on the forum can help you with that. In Europe colorFabb and Faberdashery are two of the best. Start with simple things like a cube. Try different settings and establish which settings give you the best result; take notes you will never remember it all. Layer depth is important for you; thinner layers, say 100 microns give better quality than 300 microns. Print some samples and agree with your colleagues which way you want to go. 100 microns will take approximately 3 times longer to print than using 300 microns – actually it will be less, maybe 2.6 times. Having said that I expect most of your prints will be done flat on the print bed, i.e. you would print a door, trellis, window flat, not vertically. In this case layer depth may have no impact on the visual quality. Dimensional accuracy will probably be important to you for fitting your pieces to the main model; so you need to print slow – personally I never go above 30mm/s for my window frames. Minimum layer print time will be important to you as I am guessing that whatever the scale is these will be fairly small pieces. You will probably need to print two or three concurrently. If I were doing an ordinary house I would probably print at least four windows concurrently. If you need your windows to really look like glass i.e. almost transparent, do you really?, you will probably find it easier to stick some clear plastic onto the back of the window. If you really want to print them then use one of the Taulman nylons instead of PLA and then coat the nylon with 3D-XTC, you will find a video of this on the Taulman website. Level of detail – of course this all depends on scale but e.g. door handles will probably be difficult. If you want say inset panels in doors or window rails that are curved or stepped, then you will probably want to work with a layer depth of 100 microns. If you want mastic between your window frame and wall then the thinnest you can print realistically is 400 microns; that is the visual width of the mastic not the depth. Scale is important. If you want to go smaller than 1:200/1:250 then it will become quite difficult. Plenty more I am sure but maybe that will get you started. Oh I assume you have given thought as to how you will get 3D models of your pieces, needed for 3D printing.

What is your 1st layer print speed and extruder temp.? What is your bed temp.? Did you measure your bed temp, i.e the vast majority of it, with a digital thermometer to check the temp. before starting to print? How many times did you try to set your bed levelling - were you absolutely meticulous?

Speed probably is your problem; you are printing the infill at 80 mm/s with a temp of 210. You will get better quality results if you keep all your print speeds the same, except for 1st layer where the 20mm/s you have is good. Of course for this model speed may be more important than quality for you.

I assume that as the retainer will be placed in the mouth you will need to use a material that is certified by your medical authority. I do not know if such a material exists that can be used by the UM or other similar FDM printers. If not done so already, it is probably worthwhile establishing that before going too much further.

Use Autodesk's Meshmixer (free) which is probably the de facto standard for supports, http://www.123dapp.com/meshmixer. It requires a bit more work than Cura but is infinitely better for a lot of geometries. You could always do the missing bits in Meshmixer and then bring the file across to Cura to add the rest; not that I have ever done that.

Well after 18 months of trouble free motoring I am not sure what you guys are doing with your Fab filament. I will say that before a looong print I will go though each coil of the filament to make sure it is all coiled correctly, which is not always the case. If you are printing unattended and there is a twist in the coil then that will catch you out as eventually it will quite probably snag at the entrance to the printer although sometimes it "rights" itself. You can get the same problem off a spool too though which in my experience will not "right" itself

Err, just click the "Save Toolpath" icon at the top of the print bed window

I tried again but no luck. Suggest you make a new post on "Why can I not use the messaging system" - might get picked up by an administrator

As an observation you are out by 2mm. I have never seen an error that large. On the basis that Cura is showing it as a true square then surely it must be a hardware problem.

I think a lot of people, UM printers or not, cut a point on the filament to help get the filament threaded through the various parts to the hot end. I have never investigated but if you consider firstly, the very little bends filament can have, plus the curve within it especially if from a reel, and secondly that within the printer design the "holes" that the filament needs to feed through will only have so much leeway on a 3mm measurement, then cutting a point can only help to get a smooth pathway.