eldrick

Put the glass build plate in the freezer for a while. Once it is chilled, the piece should come off easily.

Search any industrial supplier (mcmaster.com in US) for timing belts. You can get them in neoprene, silicone, or other materials that should be very grippy on the filament. Great design idea, BTW. You might consider making the cross-links longer, so that the filament is pinched between two opposing rollers, rather than bending the filament a bit between offset rollers.

It's called "thread-locker" and the classic brand is Loc-Tite. Use the medium strength version.

It would be easier to just buy better-quality filament.

It's just an adapter that holds one or more felt-tip markers against the filament. It only changes color when you change the markers.

Sketchup does a lousy job with .stl export. In tinkercad you can select from Shape Generators / Community in the object bar, and find a cylinder with as many facets as you require.

...because the users don't upgrade them, so their hardware will remain exposed to any slicer sending inappropriate too-slow speed settings to the fans,,, Oh well...

My point is that current Ultimaker machines, and the Open-Source Cura users on non-Ultimachine hardware, have no such protection, and since many of them will never get a Marlin upgrade, they won't. Cura does not currently include the trivial code that would protect these machines from potentially shortening the life of electronics and fans, for Ultimachine and other hardware. Sending an initial M106 to kickstart the fans and preventing duty cycles of less than perhaps 10-15% would pretty much fix the issue.

"IMHO, it's the firmwares job to protect the fan and kickstart it." - The firmware cannot protect the fan from software that tries to run it at damagingly slow speeds, - The vast majority of machines supported by Cura do not have any form of firmware that "kicks" the fan. IMHO, a good slicer would never send values to a fan that would certainly stall it.

You need to contact Ultimaker Support directly, not just post in the Forum. http://support.ultimaker.com/index.php?/Tickets/Submit

I have my Expert fan settings at min 20% and max 45%. However, during the print, with the cooling fans not running, if I check the fan speed on the built-in display, it usually shows a small percentage of fan on - most often 1%, 3%, 6%, sometimes as high as 12%, but generally with the fans not running. This is potentially destructive, as you can hear the fans straining to start, but not actually turning, and that means that current is going thru the driver board and the fans, heating both of them. If you turn the fan speed down, you can hear the noise drop, so this is not just a false reading. I think that this needs correction in two ways: a) many fans will stall at less than 10% or so, so Cura should never try to run them that slowly, and b) when starting the fans, it should issue an initial "kick" of higher speed to get the fans running before settling back to a low value.

Amazing - Kisslicer time estimates are in the same ballpark - about 80 hours. Hard to see why it should take that long. I was able to get Kisslicer's estimate down to 48 hrs. by only doing Infill every third layer.

That's a good way to crack the glass from the point heated by the extruder.

No resistance at all when the UM2 is Off, and you shouldn't turn the filament-grinder when the machine is on anyway, as it makes the motor act like a generator and feed current into the drivers.

Has anyone tried this drive wheel? I like the idea of the thumbwheel for manual feeding. http://deezmaker.com/store/#!/~/product/category=0&id=36429224

Printing on glue stick on glass works great with ABS. Pre-heat the bed to 100C, of course. I've printed 8" tall ABS pieces with no warpage or crackage. And you don't normally need a full enclosure - the heat from the bed will keep it warm enough.

Not when I want to kill a print and start over immediately.

And I'd love to see an Abort Print option that only retracts the same amount as a successful print, and doesn't turn off the heaters.

I think that's perhaps a good strategy only for high-res printers. Even at .16mm layer height it looks pretty awful, particularly on metallic colors. When printing one-at-a-time, it looks pretty random, except for streaks that appear in several locations per piece. The other guys all offer random placement at least, and some degree of control over where the pockmarks appear. It's a tradeoff against print time, of course, but can deliver better print quality with fewer visible seam artifacts.

The problem is that it just sets the height based on brightness - it has no relation to the actual 3D shapes in the picture. You can, however, print the Cura output on translucent plastic to get a lithopane: http://www.thingiverse.com/search/page:1?q=lithopane

I manufacture some small parts that need to look good, and I have to use Kisslicer instead of Cura, because of a bug in the "random" start/ends on external loops. The issue, on the part linked below, is that Ultimaker 2 line-start ends are nearly invisible on low layer heights, so placement is not too critical. However, I need to print these parts at .2mm layer height for strength and for a grippy surface, and the start/ends are very visible on the surface at this resolution, particularly with Silver ABS. That would be OK, if the start/endpoints were randomly distributed and just looked like texture, but the problem is that Cura places the divots in short diagonal segments from 4-10mm long, running up the sides of the part. This is very visible, and looks like the piece has cracks in it. The net is that whatever algorithm picks the random start/endpoints is badly broken, and needs to be re-done so that the divots are not clustered vertically across layers. I haven't found any way around this with Cura. Here's the example file: http://www.clearlyadjustable.com/Temp/1400403_palm4_smalflat.stl

Two enhancements for Cura, if included, would let me produce my product with better print quality than any other slicer could do: - Variable layer height. This would give me gradually decreasing layer heights as the piece comes to a rounded crown. The result would be visually-constant layer edges and a much smoother "crown" on the piece. This could be automatic or user-defined (per Slic3r). - Restrict the range of random layer start-end locations, like the "jitter" in Kisslicer. This allows "hiding" the pock-marks in less-visible parts of a piece. While on the topic, the "random" start/ends in Cura, as of 14.05RC2, are anything but random. I get lines of pox running up the piece that come out looking like cracks or random segments of seams that got lost - it's pretty badly broken "randomness".

Consider using a hobbed pulley, such as this one, instead of the current filament-grinder: http://trinitylabs.com/products/hobbed-pulley It would mangle the filament less and produce far less plastic fragments in the prints.

Use the Tools / Print One at a Time feature of Cura, and you will eliminate all that stringing. And covering the printer with a box is useless for small parts like those - the heated bed will keep them warm enough to avoid splits. Use 240C for the filament and 100C for the heated bed.

Paper varies quite a bit, and you need to use the same paper all the time, if possible. If you use flat metal feeler gauges, I find that a bit of drag on .002" (or .05mm) is about right.