aaronalai

I think I know what you're talking about, I too have seen this issue multiple times, there are little gaps between the lines that the printer head deposits. I'm not entirely sure myself which printer setting remedies this. I haven't spent much time trying to fix the problem but I think a higher printing temperature more specifically on the final layers might help. as for the stringing if you increase your retraction speed and distance you should have significantly less stringing.

Hey @Martin thanks I wasn't sure if the frame looked like a mistake or deliberate, yeah the white bolts are threaded. It took a bit of trial and error the first time around, the plastic shrinks a bit, but after I found the right dimensions I've printed bolts and corresponding threads for bolts out of different plastics from different companies with very good success and haven't had to mess with my original dimensions at all.

Thanks Braddock, lol I swear the grass is always greener on the other side. I always love seeing your newest creations!!

I love reading this thread, and seeing how much success people are having with IRobertI's feeder. I really like the design of Takei's spool holder feeder combo. I haven't had any feeder issues myself but when I do I'm going to give Takei some love and try out his feeder system. Perhaps his feeder system with IRobertI's design is the perfect combo!

@ Takei fantastic print with lots of detail, thanks for all the closeups. That's the first question I had as well when I saw the ColorFabb post, I would really like some conductive filament. I've read that most of the conductive filaments sold have very high impedance values, there was one very low impedance filament I read about and I'm just waiting until they start selling it. @colorfabb, glad to hear you guys are actively making new filament types looking forward to the bronze filament, even if it's not conductive I would still like it simply for the weight; who knows perhaps it could be used for some RF shielding. Also, that's totally the first part of the model I would have polished as well :mrgreen:. @Nateokane, glad to see the birth of another machine; sometimes I think to myself that I should have bought a kit version as well, if not to be super intimate with the inner workings of the printer. @Dreamworker, nice design, and a fantastic looking print for such a speedy print setting. I was pretty busy last week preparing for a conference and putting the finishing touches on some of my new designs. I made an illuminated picture frame: The inside of the frame has an insert full of LEDs, inspired by Nicolinux!! I waited until the print was at about the right part and just glued the LED frame in while the printer was paused (I am very thankful for this new feature). I started the print before I went to bed and kept getting up every couple of hours to check on the status. After I put the LEDs in I checked the back of the printer and discovered that I did not check how much silver filament I had before starting the print. So instead of just starting all over again, I cut the filament flush with the bottom of the motor feeder box and followed the silver filament with the red filament until the knurled wheel grabbed a hold of the red filament and went back to bed; hence the two color frame. The frame is built for a 4x6 picture and simply clamps onto the photo via the bolts and back cover. I also made what I call the Nickle Yo-Yo of death: Originally designed to give me more hang time, it's like catching a baseball ever time it comes back up into your hand. I haven't been able to play with it for long durations of time because it makes my arm sore. I also printed out my glasses frames again with significant improvements. They look similar to my other pair so I'm not posting a picture but to me they are much better. I also replaced the lenses with new shiny glasses lenses I ordered off the internet. I found a company that just makes lenses for frames, and now that they have my lens dimensions and prescription in their database I can order new lenses at will. So now my glasses can be completely destroyed and I can reprint the frames and order new lenses at any time.

Good day my Ultimaker brethren. Ian it sounds like a very exciting life change, you have an explorers soul and I like your post; car camping over Baviaria ... beautiful. I think most people like stagnant living and wouldn't take the risks that you do, I hope they are very rewarding for you . I too am doing a lot of traveling, I'm traveling through California all this week. The first leg of my journey is the ASMA (aerspace medical association) conference on the water front in San Diego. I'm giving a talk on filtering techniques for high-rate acceleration and impact data, it should prove pretty interesting. The weather is beautiful, and although I arrived only yesterday I've already done a significant amount of exploring. I've been eating delicious food and am going to a pretty famous comedy club later this evening. The second leg of my journey is to San Francisco where I'm going to finally meet some of the forum members face to face!!! I'm totally excited about the Maker Faire and am even more excited to see my 3D printing friends!! Last week was super hectic, I was preparing for my presentation and I wanted to print out some of my favorite prints and some new prints to bring to the Maker event, I re-printed the foot skeleton (the original is well...contaminated), an illuminated picture frame, a new yo-yo (this one with nickles for mass), and a brand new set of glasses frames that are significantly better than my old pair. The glasses lenses website I found totally came through and my glasses frames have new shiny lenses in them.

@IRobertI, thanks for the post. I remember living in a wildlife refuge for a summer about 30 miles away from anything including internet access and telephone. The last month of that summer I was by myself, I had Unreal installed on my computer and remember the AI being so good that it helped keep my sanity during those long days; the graphics were so buttery and it had such crisp movements.

This is definitely my favorite thread! What a spread of diverse prints that have been posted lately, I guess Ultimaker really has picked up their pace in the shipping department :mrgreen:. The new ideas springing up every day here is very surprising . @Wallan, awesome sculpting! Your piece is turning out well, regardless of the flaws you may perceive. @Osgar Schölander, your replacement part looks fantastic and very functional. @cor3ys, yeah I agree with the others, great paint job. @Didier Klein, interesting idea I could have used that last night! I have a double color print because I didn't check my spool before printing; it looks pretty cool nonetheless. @Calimero, wow, that's a really good application of support structure. I would not have guessed it to turn out so well. @Oswaldo Salzano, did you print that all out with the UM2? That's amazing, really nice attention to detail! @Andwew, at first glance I thought your picture was a CG image, very professional looking. @foehnsturm, nice demo of the nozzle sizes; I want to try and print a mini robot with the UM2 0.4 mm nozzle. @Martin Bienz, nice usage of the printer; I would really like to see a generation grow up with this technology in their everyday living. @braddock, your assembled model looks beautiful! Again, another organic shape that looks like it could have existed in reality.

@abstract I saw in your post in the ABS printing thread. I had a couple of very persistent clogged nozzles after printing with ABS plastic. To mostly fix this I used the move material option in the menu options and moved the PLA material through the print head at the ABS recommended temperature, I was extruding plastic the whole time once the head got to 200C. After I was convinced the head was clear I continued to extrude material until the nozzle got back down to 200C and spun the dial in the other direction to retract it. I say mostly fixed because I would continue to get little bits of ABS ejecting from the print nozzle, but nothing that would clog the nozzle.

I have somewhat limited experience with this but I printed my glasses http://imgur.com/fwtIBMs, I wiped the glue stick onto the surface of the bed and wiped a wet paper towel on the surface until the glue was dissolved and printed with the default bed settings. They came out super flat and I generated the curvature with a heat gun after the print.

Yikes, the activity in the forum seems to be increasing every day. This certainly is an interesting thread :mrgreen:. Anyway, @abstract thanks for the exploded view of the printer head! For some additional perspective I got little bits of the motor extruder case ground down and could see little flecks in the bowden tube, this was very minor and did not affect the extrusion rate. But, once I noticed the bits in the bowden tube I did what you did and bent the filament more normal to the bottom of the motor extruder case. I have not yet seen any bits of black plastic accumulate since. On another note, your filament looks very similar to mine when the nozzle is blocked. The filament tends to grind down, it will skip backwards but only in extreme cases like if the bed is too close to the nozzle. Do you see black flecks in the bowden tube? Also, has your filament guide proved useful?

@takei, that's a really cool idea! I get emails from this thread but they don't contain pictures; when I saw your post I thought to myself how I would make something like that, and I didn't come up with an idea as direct as yours, I like the solution. @Nicolinux not a bad idea, I don't know if I could keep it as thin though. I'll be thinking about that in my next print of the light. I want to print them out of transparent XT to see what it even looks like.

Thanks for the advice guys I definitely lost sight of why I have a job in the first place, it was more fun when I treated it as just a portion of my life and not my entire life. @Ian, Congratulations once again on the new job !!! It sounds right up your alley and a higher pay is always a nice prospect, I hope the new job brings you a fresh perspective and mobility. @gr5, I remember when the number of likes was increased, there are a lot of really interesting comments in the forum its difficult to conserve the resource :lol:. You and the other mods have been answering a lot of questions lately, I am always impressed by how fast you guys respond to forum material.

Also, IRobertI's sugestion is useful; this his how I printed out my glasses frames. I used a hot air gun to heat up specific parts and applied a little pressure to bend them into the shape I wanted; if you are printing in PLA, dipping the piece in hot water for a brief period of time may work for your application.

I would try printing it on its edge, below is a propeller I printed and it turned out fantastic: This is what the support material edge looked like: Those little hinges on the ends may prove difficult though, you may have to implement something like Meshmixer if the Cura auto support won't generate a support structure. As for everything else in your list of prints, I don't think they need support structure. If you are not sure how the piece will print the "Layers" view in Cura is really quite helpful.

As usual many superior prints/paint jobs; nice looking paint job Valcrow. @Braddock, thanks for the post. I've been wondering about the print material for a while; I knew it was expensive and I heard it was brittle which are the two reasons I did not go that route either. I'm hoping water soluble support material along with a second extruder will brighten up ugly overhangs. I spent an afternoon designing and building this little guy; it's a key-ring flashlight. I wanted to build something really small that had no other pieces other than leds (surface mount), wire, and a battery. For the switching mechanism, you push the battery towards the led side of the device, there are little notches that hold the battery in place and keep the battery from falling out the back of the device. The battery can be removed if enough force is exerted to push it pas the notches at the back. This is sort of the evolution of the light, initially it was just to test an idea I had to embed circuitry into the plastic via channels for wires and such. It ended up working and led to the LED flashlight. The solder job is significantly better than what is depicted below, all the functional units are glued together. If anyone is interested I can take a really good picture of one before it gets sealed, I'm currently printing out a whole tray of them. I think the coolest part is the switching mechanism. The battery touches wire that I've melted into the plastic itself, I take a pair of tweezers and bend a really small hook into the wire end, then rest it upon little plastic islands I printed out to retain the metal, and touch the tip of my iron to the top of the hook which supplies heat to the bottom of the hook which resides on the plastic island. The heat melts the plastic and I push down just a little with the iron to seat everything; the bond is really strong and I have yet to break the switching mechanism through lots and lots of fiddling.

Hey Diad, I've been messing with the 14.04RC1 and the accompanying firmware. I really like the new start-up sequence, it's pretty slick and controls the priming filament well. There is a small problem I've been having with the start-up sequence though, it tries to pump out the filament too quickly and the extruder motor ends up grinding the filament down so much so that the knurled driving wheel cannot translate the filament at all. I think the green Ultimaker filament is more susceptible to grinding than the other colors are, so take that for what it's worth I suppose. I'll eventually get some different colors in there to see if I get the same problems.

Hey guys, I drink a lot of coffee and thought I would chat it up with ya'll. I know I was away for a while; blarp, I had many things meticulously planned out in my life then work swallowed me up like a title-wave. For several weeks I was just sleeping and working with very little of anything else. I took some time off to reset and that helped, but work got hectic when I returned and all the problems started up again. Things were really stressful up until today when I had a long heart to heart with my boss and he was very receptive. I finally feel like things are smoothing out and that I can breath and enjoy my personal life again. Anyway, I'm pleased to see all the activity in the forum recently and specifically this thread. On another note I found an online company that makes glasses lenses. You send them your prescription and frames and they populate them with the lens type you choose (plastic, glass, coatings, tints...). I sent them my old frames and requested actual glass lenses because every pair of glasses I've ever discarded was because they were too scratched up (even with a scratch resistant coating), and glass is really scratch resistant. The cool thing is that they said if I sent them 3D printed frames they could try to populate those as well, so theoretically I could print out any style of frames that I want and get them filled with prescription lenses. I'm getting my frames back probably around Monday, I'm pretty excited to see how this turns out.

I caught this video of the software you were using Jonathan Gueron, that's some pretty cool stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzCeHFEUaro, also nice application or the software. That's a huge haul Leo! You'll have to tell us what you think about that pen, do you think it could be used to fuse prints together? @Valcrow and IRobertI, yeah I'm probably just jealous of the artistic capacities all of these Ultimaker people have...who am I kidding I would probably just sculpt naked ladies if I could do what those guys are doing :mrgreen:. @Didier Klein nice prints, they look very professional. That skull looks really slick, lots of detail and very shiny. Nice camera setup, I've been wanting to set something up on my rig as well. Did you use a raspberry pi camera to get higher frame-rates for online video streaming? If so are you pleased with the quality?

Really nice demon reptile braddock!! Again, very impressive anatomy. I've spent a great deal of time studying herpetological species and I swear I've seen reptiles almost exactly like the one you crafted, sans the head. Great looking bust print fabskill. Did you use the Cura support structure? I've found that it works better than people have claimed. After seeing all the great prints of Braddock's bust I want to definitely print it out now. I like the filament you are used IRobertI, green is my favorite color, what is the exact filament you printed with?

I thought this thread was dead, last time I checked things were going well. Sorry to hear about your woes Schafe. Now that I've had my UM2 for a while and have spent, uh probably too many hours watching it print stuff out I've got a slightly different perspective on the machine. I keep forgetting to ask this question, but does your extruder motor skip backwards when the cylinder underextrusion happens? I've got perfect cylinders on every material I've tried; and I've tried full, half full, and almost empty spools with no difference, and all on the stock holder. I've had two underextruded cylinders, each failing at 10 mm^3/s; cylinder 1 was being extruded at 200C (I was testing to see how fast I could print at very low temps), cylinder 2 was being extruded at 150% so that one was definitely going to fail. Never did the extruder motor loose power and skip, I don't think my machine is exceptional or anything, the extruder motor will skip sometimes when the machine primes the nozzle at the very beginning of a print or if the bed is too close to the nozzle and there is not enough room for the plastic to come out on the first layer.

Thanks, the models you've been creating make me really interested Zbrush type software. I know that the possession of the software will not enhance my artistic abilities though :mrgreen:. I'm stuck in this planes and extrusions realm!! I really like your alien head, especially the teeth and cheeks. Your models look so fleshy and anatomically believable, the anatomy is always so realistic for something that is fictitious.

@LeoDDC, what do you do for a living? Are you and braddock friends :mrgreen:? Your model looks great, with lots of well printed detail. When I saw your first image I thought the support structure was some misshaped hand supporting the head.

Wow, this thread constantly amazes me!! The organic shapes and contours you guys are producing are mesmerizing, and it's clear that you have a lot of control over your printers. I've been printing every day, but nothing really beautiful. I haven't posted in a while and thought I would show some things I've been printing that you may find interesting. I printed the gyroscope, but the mass was too difficult to get just right on such a large ring. The motor sits inside a compartment inside the cage structure; I printed everything in pieces and press fitted them together. I printed out some single axis masses for the gyroscope with much better success; the one on top is filled with nickles, and I can balance it and the motor on my finger while it's spinning. This new mass is too big for the holder now, so now I have to either re-design the cage or the mass holder to get all the pieces to fit together. I'm very surprised by the durability of the PLA plastic; the mass spun off the motor several times and slammed into a solid body without breaking. I thought it would be sort of cool to have a really large gyroscope, but if your finger or something hits the mass (which is very likely without the cage) it just gets a mind of it's own starts wreaking havoc. I've been interested in making a ball-socket joint for a while and made this piece. The ball snap fits into the socket and is free to rotate, and the holes on the sides of the cylinders extend through the body for wires to feed through. Very much in progress though. Also, I've been working on this project that is still pretty up in the air right now but I wanted to show some close-ups of the print quality. It's printed in one piece and is water tight. This is a dish of bolts. I know it seems sort of boring, but I saw this sitting at my work station and thought it was just interesting to see such a "boring" thing printed out, or something like that. Also, my wall of cylinders.

Hey braddock, Nick is correct. The heel is barley touching the build plate, the support structure sort of obscures it though so the foot does look like it's floating on top of the support material. Also, WOW there have been a lot of great looking prints over the last couple of days.