shurik

This is what we have in my room at work, since my wife asks me to remove the "plastic garbage" as she says, from the home. The stretchlets and the cuddling cats proved to be the unbeatable presents!

Thanks guys. I know all too well what these French are going thru, so a little sympathy won't be bad. @titus - UM Blue, Colorfabb White, Faberdashery Firetruck Red - Europe united against the terror. :-) And of course, you got it right how it was printed and assembled. @didierklein - I live in Israel, heh. Once missed a suiside moron by about 20-30 seconds. In 2006 war, a rocket missed our command post by just a few meters. It's not nice, not at all. From the other side, these cowards only admit that they have no real chance of destroying us. Only fear is their weapon. And as long as this little Ultibot is smiling, they are going to fail.

It was obvious for me - to print something like that today...

It is too close to the notifications button, making it really inconvenient experience - to look for the new stuff under the button?

Shifted layers = XY axes not clean enough. Put a tiny bit of machine oil (not WD40!!!) on the axes, cleaning them as you do. You should feel that the printhead moves much more easily and smoothly after that. Or there is a problem with the belts. But that is harder to guess. :-)

Hi @JohnFox, Can you share the STL please? The rolls of 100m are really tricky to handle...

@ian - welcome back! I was missing you!

@cloakfiend - you have printed this lamp?! That is outstanding, then. It would be very interesting to see a close-up if possible.

For the albums, I would prefer to keep the last selected option as suggested by the default next time the "Select Album" dialogue is activated.

Some updates that might be helpful. After having lots of trouble,I removed the small black ring that was between the brass hotend and the white teflon. The things did improve but not quite sufficiently. There were yet some strange under-feedins of the material. So, I took the tension yoke off my Robert's feeder, and it looked very interesting: Once the yoke being replaced, the extrusion test went from this to this: It started to click on 9mm3 and stopped with "Temp. sensor error" in the mid-10mm3. And here is the cube of @Nicolinux: Bottom layers: The whole cube: Colorfabb White, 210C. Sorry for the quality of the phone camera. While not 100% perfect, it looks OK in the reality. So, could it be that your feeder motor or the yoke from the other side of the filament are not aligned properly or something else obstructs the feeder flow? Not quite sure what to do with that temp. sensor error, though. It appeared once or twice before, during the nozzle cleaning heatups, so I disregarded it up until now.

@DidierKlein - Your review is very interesting and practical. However, one pic worth 1K words. Can you perhaps make some illustrations to highlight the explanations?

@Titus - I'm happy that it took only about half a year to bring the forum back to almost normal functionality. The chat is missing yet, though. I can go on and continue with my feelings but there would be only very few compliments to share. Right now, there are all kinds of false notifications on supposedly new messages in different topics I'm following. Can it be checked? Chrome, Win7 64bit.

Good luck man!

@kelechi, in the case of the failure in the middle of a big print, I modified the original model by cutting off the part that was printed successfully, so my new STL only contained the missing stuff. Then, after all the parts were printed, the Superglue was used to finish the job. Just make sure the glued surfaces have some good contact. In my case these were thin (0.8mm) walls, so I used reinforcement plates on the back.

I have one laying somewhere. Was unable even to extract an STL file from the format it records to. Left the idea there. Any clues would be appreciated, BTW.

I use Robert's feeder, there's nothing to clean there. The filament change is always done using the Atomic pull method, so the nozzle is clean, too. Maybe, the PLA of the feeder is worn out? I will probably re-print it, just in case.

Yes, my post shows not the top layers but the same problem - irregular and unpredictive underextrusion. If you think the post doesn't belong here - by all means, please move it to more appropriate topic. It looks like there is temporary underfeeding of the plastic during the print, occurring more or less at random. There are no clicks of the classical underextrusion. The filament is Colorfabb, last couple of meters of it freely hanging behind the printer, no obstructions whatsoever. The curvature radius should not be the problem, either, as it happens to me on other rolls, too. Like for @Nicolinux, there may be a few successful prints, and then - what you see. I use the latest stable 15.04.02 both for slicing and on the printer. Recently, installed the Olsson's block, and there where my troubles started. Could it be that I messed up something? Not sure which way to look...

Another day, another fail. It feels like a Russian roulette - you never know how it will go. In this case, all started well, but not for very long. So, what could it be?

@GeorgB - I had something similar when Cura was directing the printer to make infill before the outer shell for each layer. In the later versions of Cura, the setting "Print infill atfer perimeters" solved the problem. Alternatively, you might try to print colder, at 240C and slower, at 30mm/sec to see if that helps.

Oh, it just took me one month to see that the topic had replies. My apologies, the forum engine is just great. @tinydancer - it were just two lessons, about 45 minutes each. So, we did not have much time. Since I was too lazy to bring the printer itself, we saw the photos of it, a very short movie of UM2 working, especially - starting to print and finishing a print. Then, I brought a whole lot of all kinds of small nice things printed over the time, to show off. We spoke about the principles of the 3D printing process, materials, including the examples of filaments, Q&A. We only had a few minutes left to show Cura, Tinkercad and Meshmixer, but they hopefully got the idea. At the end, the great cats giveaway concluded the show. It looks like we all enjoyed the day. Personally, would recommend people here to try this - very rewarding experience.

Thanks guys, will try to flip the glass although it is unlikely the source of the problem. It used to be good, except some slight tilt to the far-right corner, but this is how the printer originally came. More or less, all the sudden, there is this strange pattern. Most probably, it comes from the rods or the belts but at the moment, have no idea where to start looking at.

Hi guys, Yes, the 1st layer is the standard 0.3mm. What are these round circles? The buildplate cannot be lowered or raised, as it will worsen either the round-circled "flower" or the rest of the plate. What a nasty puzzle...

Well, one picture worthy 1000 words: PLA, recently installed Olsson's 0.4 nozzle. Pay the attention to the rough and uneven layering everywhere. Why? What can be done to fix that?

Thanks @rubin. To be honest, the photos do favor the models. If you would inspect them carefully, some imperfectnesses can be spotted, will mention them later. However, overall, the model looks really nice, indeed. Sketchup + Cura. That's it. Oh, the original files from the architect were received as DWG, so the DWG viewer was also used. As I replied you on another thread, try to use DAE format when exporting complex architectural models. However, small parts, like the balconies, windows inserts, etc. are better to be saved as STL. Do not know why. During the save, their scale goes off usually by the factor of 10, so you will need to either scale up or down by 10 or 100 but that's not a big deal, of course. No way to do so, mate. Each part has to be printed separately, cleaned and glued together. Lots of work but I do scale modelling, so it's my hobby! Here, each balcony is 5 parts. The ground floor was printed separately. The rooftop too. You can see a line above the 2nd floor. I was trying to print the whole box at once and it got screwed up above this level. So I cut off the bad part and printed what was missing. Yes, lots of work. Separately printed inserts. Yes, lots of them, and in different sizes... BTW, I like the way the hollow windows look like on your model. Will probably suggest this approach for the next models. PLA. Only use Colorfabb and Fabedashery brands. That's no problem at all, always welcome. Now, a few general things that came to my mind while typing the post: What material do you use? PLA is ways easier to work with but you have to keep in the mind its low heat tolerance. What print settings do you use? Bed temp., print temp., speed, layer, etc. Be very careful with the torch! Personally, I would not use it. The cheap blade knife does the job for me. Just keep enough plasters for the cut fingers. The bed levelling or the bed temperature might need to be adjusted - there is one corner on your photos that is curved up. A brim might help here if a careful levelling and 60C bed for PLA are not enough. Out of pure curiosity - by the type of the building and the writings on it - are we neighbours by a chance?

Since I do make architectural models too - what @gr5 said + it is usually better to split a large model like that into parts and then to glue them. This way, if there is a failure at a certain floor, it will not ruin the rest of the model,it an be spotted more quickly and will cost less to fix. I also print separately balconies and the rest of the stuff that otherwise would need a support. Overhangs for windows are not needed. UM2 can handle well gaps up to an inch (2.5-3cm) with no visible quality loss, given the rest of the print settings are OK. Example: