donmilne

I'm afraid I don't remember the details of what settings I used. I would have used the expert settings and used 0.1mm layers. Print speed would have been mid range (say 45 mm/s). I suspect that making it as slow as 5 mm/s might be counterproductive. The filament was the UM blue that came with the printer. You don't mention temperature: I would avoid getting the temperature too high. I still have the openscad scripts, stl files and gcode files for some of the above projects (definitely the M6 bolt and two nuts). You could use these to verify the results on your own printer - you can extract Cura settings from a gcode file. If you pm me an email address then I can send what I have to you.

Wouldn't the US distributor be the better option for support? I'm afraid I don't know their contact details. Didn't you buy the printer from them?

I suppose if you have a skirt or brim that extends right to the corner then that might be a problem.

That's a Windows configuration issue, not a problem with Cura. You need to right click on the STL file and choose "Open with...|Choose program", select Cura and tick the "Always use the selected program" checkbox. That's on XP (English). Other Windows versions may be worded slightly differently.

Both prints sliced with the same version of Cura?

I forgot to mention the filament duster that I also have, just below the feeder.

My filament goes around filament guide, below the power cord (in fact, below another printed filament guide that protects the power cord), and then up to the pulleys on geeks variant of Robert's feeder. I feel that the large loop ensures that the filament is entering the feeder in more or less a straight line, which probably helps to reduce friction.

It fits in the hole like the key in a lock, and turns in a similar way. I have to disagree with Didier: I think you should try to get it fitted. It ensures that the filament has a more gentle bend radius, hopefully reducing feeder problems.

I kept getting "account suspended". At first I wondered what I had done to warrant summary execution, then I realized that it must be that the forums are hosted by some service. Maybe UM forgot to pay the bill?

Plating diamond? Pull the other one! It isn't even a conductor is it? Vapor deposition maybe, but not plating! Btw, Nickel Sulfate isn't really that nasty. It's just a salt. I wouldn't want to drink the solution, but then I wouldn't want to drink seawater either!

Well, nobody can beat free, but FYI nickel plating at home is trivially easy. Here's a YouTube video on the subject :- But, ignore his (impossible to find) Nickel plating solution, and scroll down the comments for the recipe given by MrSwanley (that would be me... :-). I used this trick to nickel plate some copper coins. The trick is to get the brass or copper spotless clean, i.e. scrub with soapy water to get rid of grease, then soak in salt and vinegar to remove oxide layer. Pure nickel welding electrodes and nickel sulfate electrolyte can be found on eBay.

"then the nozzle dips into the blob". Hmm. I'm not sure that's what I see: I see a x-y move to the approx center of the bed while the bed is being raised. I believe the idea is to lay the priming material in a run along the glass where it hopefully starts the brim. In practice the xy-move leaves a wisp of material hanging loose. I've had occasions when the print head catches this and peels part of the print off the table. So, I prefer to be there when the filament is priming, allowing it to fall between the points of a pair of tweezers. When the xy-move starts I pinch off the primed material and dispose of it. Seems to work ok.

Hmm. It seems to me that the top layer is missing, and I'm seeing the shell and infill. Have you checks the bottom/top layer thickness?

All software for PC that I'm aware of will convert curves into piecewise approximations, and therefore would not solve the problem posed. Just because the shader gives you a good illusion of a curved surface doesn't mean that it really has that curve.

<innocent>Do you have the formula handy for calculating the bezier parameters of the curve which represents the intersection between an arbitrary 3D surface and a horizontal plane?</innocent> :wink: Oh, also toss in this thought: in the depths of the controller where gcodes are turned into stepper motor moves, how to handle that? Seriously, it's probably an unnecessary complication. The printer has a finite resolution. You can reach that resolution using linear moves, and you can't better it with complex curves. In the past I thought that at least the gcode file would be resolution independant, but you can achieve that in practice by levelling up to a high resolution.

Without looking at the Cura code... Almost all software will show numbers to some fixed precision - say 3 or 4 decimal places max. With a floating point representation there's no easy way to know which of the imprecisely stored digits constitute the correct level of rounding in your thinking. It also can't store to an abitrary precision. The memory of the number of digits you entered is lost as soon as the number is converted to floating point. The only way it could satisfy your expectations would be to store reals as strings or very big scaled integers.

Um, George... we Brits gave up imperial units decades ago! The only people who still use them will be old retired engineers on woodworking forums and the like. As the saying goes, "a pint is a pound, the world around, provided the world consists of USA and Liberia..." Regarding the OPs problem - it crossed my mind to wonder about filament tension. Too much tension could increase the load on the feeder motor and cause skipping. If the filament has very heavy track marks from the knurled drive wheel then the tension is too high.

What is the filament exactly? More than PLA, who makes it, what color/type? Print speed? Layer thickness? The pictures are rather small, even when full size, but I seem to be seeing a thicker bottom layer towards the front right than towards the back left? - implying a levelling problem. If the bed is too close then this can sometimes block the nozzle.

I'm also talking 100% acetone bought in a 2.5L bottle from eBay. I use it in my workshop, and I don't wear nail varnish! In truth I can't quite be certain of what my test was (it was a quick test done about 14 months ago), but what I think I did was dunk a small failed print in a glass of acetone to see the effect. The quickest visible effect was that the pigment was bleached, and after 30 minutes or so I removed it. It's possible that the PLA itself would start to go if I left it in there longer, but I'm not sure that would be a useful result.

Oh yeah, I forgot there's that little wheel hub too that fits inside the bearing to provide the support for the M3 axle. In practical terms I found it a PITA to obtain one 16mm M3 screw. It's easier to take one of that packet of 25mm screws you bought and cut it to 16mm. Any engineer worth his salt has access to a hacksaw.

You mean what Robert calls the "yoke"? That's the U shaped piece - the bearing axle is an M3 machine screw that needs to be cut to a perfect length. You'll notice that the yoke has two holes of unequal size. The screw passes through the larger hole and screws into the smaller hole on the other side. It's just an axle so it doesn't need to be screwed down hard.

We had a similar discussion quite recently. The link below takes you to my previous answer. http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/9531-my-ultimaker-v2-is-having-trouble-printing/?p=93184 You should make printing Robert's feeder a high priority. You'll never have to open the feeder case again, because it doesn't have one!

This topic puzzles me. When I tried soaking UM Blue PLA in acetone the PLA wasn't touched at all. All that happened was that the blue pigment turned white. That was a year ago, before I learned that the YouTube vids only applied to ABS.

Note the dates on the Netfabb files. The only thing you need is the Cura download - the big download button. You don't need anything else from the "Other Downloads" list.

Hi. A lot of suppliers say 3mm but in fact it is 2.85mm +/- 0.1mm (or something like that). You really need to ask the supplier for an accurate specification. 3mm filament should physically fit, but look out for sloppy tolerances (variations in diameter), as these are often the biggest concern with cheap filament - along with inconsistent/unknown PLA formulation. If you have a good local supplier of 3mm filament then I'd guess you'll be fine. As I mentioned, this is probably 2.85mm filament anyway.