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roger-fujii

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  1. Uh, customs isn't that arbitrary ( had to reply to a PM, so while I am here... ). If you look at a customs form, you'll see there are basically 3 important variables. The description of the item, what the value is, and who's going to pay for customs charges ( Example: http://www.pcb.ca/pdf/forms/USCustomsInvoice.pdf ) It's highly unlikely that DHL would mess this up, so if there has been shipments to the US that didn't have a customs fee before, the likely explanation why something is charged now is that something has changed. Either there's a new tariff that took effect on January, or maybe the exchange rate value is now past some threshold amount. It'd be interesting to see what the the attached customs form says (with personal information redacted). In any case, I think it's fair to say that all US recipients should expect to pay this. As to who is supposed to pay, here's a quick description: http://www.dutycalculator.com/help_center/who-is-responsible-for-the-payment-of-import-duty-and-taxes/ I've always had it done as described in paragraph 2, but, well..... Ebay also concurs, though they make it clear that To avoid problems, make sure that your listing clearly states this. You can cut and paste this directly into your listing: International Buyers – Please Note: Import duties, taxes, and charges are not included in the item price or shipping cost. These charges are the buyer's responsibility. Please check with your country's customs office to determine what these additional costs will be prior to bidding or buying. (from http://pages.ebay.com/help/pay/international-shipping-rules.html )
  2. well, technically, it's if the vendor has a presence in the state, you get the sales tax, and the latter thing you describe is called a use tax ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_tax ) I wonder if that charge has to do with: http://www.dhl.nl/en/express/shipping/shipping_advice/rate_increase.html It could be that the increase took away from the customs payment, which is why you are seeing a customs bill. Anyway, Imouttahere.
  3. No matter what the answer is, you have to have some confidence that the answer is right. While I would fault Ultimaker for being unrealistically optimistic about their ability to clear backlog and try to obfuscate what the backlog is, I haven't seen a documented out-right lie (yet). My suspicion is that they didn't properly account for the xmas/new years slowdown and there may also have been a blip in the number of orders which caused them to revise the lead time from 6-8 (realistically 8-10) to 8-10 (I'll leave it to you to figure out what the realistic wait time is). Here's how you can piece together what it is going to be. Look around for how long people say it took them to get one (I would suggest as a service to readers that people reading this should post the order date and when the order was shipped so that other people can have a feeling on how long a realistic wait is). As of this post, they seem to be working on orders in the early November time frame. Then grub around for people who post what the answer to their lead time query were. Just saw something with a Nov 20 with a quote for 1st week in Feb ( almost 11 weeks ). Now, this period is somewhat tricky because of the anomaly that the xmas/new years period induces. On the good(?) side, you'll have people like me that's tired of the shenanigans and drop out (well, trying to, anyway), and there's no scheduled Dutch holidays for the near future, so if there was ever a time they would make progress on their backlog, it would be in this period. However, and I said this before, there is no reason to believe your order would be fulfilled sooner than the what you see people currently getting. That is, if you were quoted 8, and people are saying they have waited 10 weeks, don't expect that 8 week estimate is accurate until you see someone saying they got one in less than 10 weeks.
  4. You have no data to support that. Just because people don't complain, doesn't mean they don't have the problem. I, for one, wouldn't complain about it (assuming the method(s) to clear it worked (and assuming I had a printer to begin with)) and as long as it didn't happen too often. You could think of it like the reasons for product recalls (and I am in no way saying that the U2 should be recalled). Stuff gets recalled because there is an acknowledged problem - not because lots of people have the problem. Setting this aside, it's certainly not unfair to say that there's reason to believe there are issues with the new head design. All I was saying was that the printer certainly isn't perfect, and one must weigh its imperfections and other factors with the very long backlog the Ultimaker 2 has. Obviously, print heads clogging isn't an unknown issue with 3D printers - so much so that various manufacturers have designed in easily replaceable (or even almost disposable) heads. Though the U2's largest problem is sales support - something of Ultimaker's own making.
  5. Frustrated isn't the right word.... it's the feeling you get when you've been put on hold on the phone for two hours with the message "We consider your call very important...." repeating all the while for a problem they force you to call on, and you know they just laid off half the customer support staff ( 'they' meaning a random company, not meaning Ultimaker, just to be clear ) Xperiment's wait time for an October order was 10 weeks. Mine (ordered in early/mid Nov, and was also told 8 weeks as late as mid December) is/was in its 10th week. The current stated wait time for a new order is 8-10 weeks (at least they owned up to that it wasn't 6-8 weeks). Not trying to sound crass, but given that, what is the probability that yours will take 8 weeks? The Felix printer is notable. Hearing good things on the Zortrax. There's some people at a local makerspace that is working on a high fidelity printer. There are also some reasonable deltabots that are entering into the picture. All of these are less than the U2, but would probably suffice for the near term, plus they would most likely treat their current/potential customers better. The Z18 is interesting, but expensive, but as with @sylvain, keeping an eye on this.
  6. The U2 is already in the upper bound of what the printer is offering - look at it this way, if you raise the price by not too much ( say 300-500 USD), you can certainly buy two fairly good printers for that amount. The Felix guys did what I suggested previously - stop taking orders until you get the lead time under control - this path annoys the least amount of people. I can say for sure that as a (hopefully former) customer, I am certainly annoyed by how it is currently belng handled.
  7. @Stuart838 - any date they give you is unreliable. I just sent in my cancel request - since this is the beginning of week 3 of January ( the 10th week since I ordered ) and was told in mid-December that Your Ultimaker 2 is scheduled to be shipped in week 02 of January. I am afraid I do not have an exact date. We have doubled our production and hope to send you the Ultimaker 2 sooner. That last bit is especially irking since there was -> zero <- chance that that would happen. As I said previously, If the scaling is only keeping up with increasing new orders, it is rather disingenuous to imply that the current backlog is going to be processed faster. As I have given all the time they have asked for and was agreed to and that a) the U2 is still having production QC issues B) the new U2 head seems to clog often c) There are other interesting prospects now available or on the near horizon ( you certainly can get them faster than ordering and actually receiving a U2 today ) d) this is the worst online ordering experience I've ever made (and I've made plenty over the years ) and e) Ultimaker seems so far behind that it seems ot be impacting repairs, I feel canceling is the best course of action. For people trying to figure out what the wait time really is, go to the ultimakter u2 order page and look at what their stated lead time is and take the largest number (afaics, they haven't made their lower bound since October). If you see people posting on this forum/thread that they are actually getting it sooner than that backlog, then adjust accordingly.
  8. My "guess" (I'm a unix guy) is that either there's a driver enforcement issue [ see http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/9564-run-administrator-windows-8-a.html ], then if that succeeds, THEN plug the USB device in. Hope this helps.
  9. I think the biggest problem you have is trying to make the environment sterile so that whatever comes out of the extruder isn't contaminated when the plastic cools. PLA is deemed food safe: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7737601 [hmmm. this editor is having issues with links] but it seems that internal uses isn't without issue: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19250160 Here's a link with a vendor listed: http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?194,198904 gr5 edit: fixed above link
  10. The ABS slurry (google "ABS juice") is relatively popular. Printing on Kapton tape has its fans also. I hear PET tape is also good. This guy seems to have some good advice (scroll down to the 'How do I get my filament to stick and STAY stuck?' http://makergeeks.blogspot.com/2013/12/great-3d-printing-gift-packages-on-sale.html?view=sidebar Seems the rule is YMMV and stick to the way that you can get to work.....
  11. @Xperiment Happy New Year. But just so I know how to start my new year, was your time to ship really 10 weeks or did I count wrong?
  12. Bare in mind that your headaches are going to come from non-uniform shrinkage (ie curling) (though if you had uniform shrinkage, it will pop off the bed). There's some ABS with additives that try to minimize (note the word is not "eliminate") the problem. As your results will depend on variables that isn't in the printer's control ( the filament properties, workspace environment ), 3d printing /will/ require some tweaking. If you are familiar with baking ( bread, cookies....), it's like that.
  13. +1 on what illuminarti said. People often confuse "resolution" with "precision", and you don't get high precision by just slapping together high resolution parts. Having parallel rods should distribute the load stresses (assuming it's designed right), but if the rods aren't perfectly parallel, it will induce problems of it's own. Just looking at pictures of the QU-BD, I would guess it has issues with the bed jamming/skipping for the same reason. As with all technology based stuff, you rarely get something worse by waiting longer, so if waiting is an option, by all means.....
  14. The one thing glaring about the Zortrax is that it doesn't mention how fast it can print. There's no way that print head can be as fast as a light head. Since the unit is pretty much just out to market, it's impossible to make a good comparison as far as quality goes - the torture test model was printed with supports, which I don't think reviews on Makershed allowed. On paper, the Zortrax looks fine if speed isn't an issue. Whether they execute fine is another issue. The u2 does have some things going for it other than speed: it has a bigger build volume and since the software is more open, it can be tweaked. On the downside, there's the cost, and (at the rate they are going now) the 8+ weeks delivery time. The 2014 3d printer review of Make: has some interesting entries if you really want your head to explode..
  15. My sincere apologies. It is incorrect to imply that Ultimaker was using that as an excuse. The inference wasn't deliberate on my part. I was taking exception that GR5 was using it as some justification. I edited the post (still awkwardly worded, I agree, but now it's technically correct and shows what I was trying to say). ? I have never said that I objected to any lead time. I have no objections to: "And we start shipping the Ultimaker 2 at Ocotober 21st, and we intend to keep the leadtime under 2 weeks" and I have stated in a previous post: "3) Do not take any orders which won't be delivered in > 5-6 weeks (more on this a little later)" But the current lead time of 6-8+ weeks is bordering if not excessive for something that is supposed to be ready to order. I do not see anything contradictory the statement "you shouldn't bill if you can't start processing the work", or as a corollary, "bill when you actually start working on it". Do a poll of people and see what they think of a company that charges at the moment of order, wont' start work on it for 5 weeks, and won't deliver the product for 3 weeks after that. But here is the problem with this approach: it's not as if the upstream (the customers who aren't immediately affected) have no effects on them. Using your example, they people > 2 weeks might have their orders delayed by let's say 3 days (this # is just for the sake of this discussion). If some other production problem causes another 2 days of delay, your upstream people are now 1 more business week behind without ever knowing that their order is being delayed. So, instead of the 6-8 weeks people are being told and expecting, it's slipped to 7+ weeks on an order. You may think it's better to tell the person just before they expect it shipped that it's going to be late a couple of weeks. I can say for me, I would rather know, so *I* don't make plans assuming the printer is going to be there when it's known a month in advance that it's going to be late. Be that as it may, I don't think the people making these.... less than optimal decisions.. are reading this forum, so please don't take this as trying to lay the blame on anyone. And I am sure people are trying hard - though I suspect it's like 'bailing out the Titanic with a bucket' given what is observable from the outside. As this is mid-week of week 50 on the schedule, and we (still) have no clue where things currently stand, I have given up hope that they can meet their 6-8 week lead time, and am unwilling to give any more given how little/badly things are communicated. Hopefully, support will respond to my email faster than it did for Xperiment's. OAO
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