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I have checked other examples. None seem to show "Name" and/or "Excerpt" All I see is: "Information", "Documents", and "Comments" tabs. I do see "Description" under the Information tab, but that is a separate field in the form that is filled out when submitting a model to YouMagine. Can you please provide a link for a model where I can see Name and Excerpts?

In the first photo the bottom layer is still very thin, I think it was .1 mm. I have since increased the "Initial layer thickness" to .15 mm. I made a print with a brim line amount of 20, so I would have plenty of time to fiddle with the screws while the brim was being printed. When I now print the brim no longer looks like in that first photo. It is now pretty good, albeit not perfect. I now consistently print at 30 mm/sec. And I have been printing the first layer at 220, and then turning the temp down to 210. I looked at your stringing tests. I will turn my next print down to 190, and see what happens. San Francisco with San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge and SF Giants ballpark in the backgroound. I will not come the the NYC Maker Faire. However I was at the San Mateo Maker Faire. My mind was already made up to buy a UM2 before I came to the fair. I told one guy, "I loved the guy who did that 23 hour dragon print on YouTube". "I'm the guy", Simon Oliver said. I also met one of the founders of the company at the Ultimaker booth. Like everybody at the booth, he was very friendly.

Thanks for the compliment. The tripod mount was made of the Belkin Grip Candy case for iPhone 5 and 5s. You don't have to bend back the top. The phone inside it's cover just slides in and out. It is held in place quite securely. The mount is 20 mm wide. The first one was 16 mm, and I wanted a bit more stability. I wanted to upload it the stl file to YouMagine, but I could not figure out a couple of required questions. In the form that needs to be filled out I don't understand "Name" and "Excerpt". What is expected under "Name"? My name or the name of the item I am uploading. What is expected to be filled out in the "Excerpt" field?

I am ready to upload my first stl file to YouMagine, and I have a couple of questions about this. In the form that needs to be filled out I don't understand "Name" and "Excerpt". What is expected under "Name"? My name or the name of the item I am uploading. What is expected to be filled out in the "Excerpt" field?

Finally my prints are getting better. They are not yet perfect as you can see here. I have no idea how to avoid those extrusions sticking out of the sides. The completed part looked OK though because I was able to remove those sections sticking out. BTW, this was my first attempt at making a tripod mount for my iPhone with its case attached. It was not bad, but it was a bit weak because the nut would be pulled out by the tripod screw when I tried to tighten it too much. So I made a new one with the nut inside the part, which I was able to do by using the pause plugin of Cura. I'm pretty happy with the result.

The same issue still continues after three days, and nobody seems to be paying attention. Or are we the only two users who are experiencing this issue?

I wanted to upload a few files of something I printed to my album to show off, and no matter if I try the "basic uploader" or the "advanced uploader", I get the same error message: The server returned an error during upload. Does anybody have any idea what I may be doing wrong?

When I printed a second similar part, with layer height set to .1 mm the X at the bottom did not show up. And the trash sticking out of the sides also did not happen again. When I printed that second model again with minor modifications, no X on the bottom, but the trash on the sides happened again. Each time the trash happened I could clean it off the finished print, but I would like to avoid it altogether. I don't know how to turn retraction on or off. The only place where retraction seems to have settings in Cura is in the Expert config window. I have minimum travel at 1.5, combing turned off (as per your earlier suggestion), minimal extrusion 0.02, and Z hop at 0.075. I just tried that last one, without really understanding what this would do, because the hover over balloon in Cura suggested it. Frankly I don't really know why I chose a first layer height of 0.1 mm, and I changed it since to 0.2 mm. The bottom layer looks a lot better now. I made a print with a brim setting at 20, which gave me a lot of time to fiddle with the screws under the build platform to get the first layer to look better, before the printer started printing my model. I think this may have worked. I don't know yet what layer height to choose for what models, and I have set the layer height to 0.1 mm for my last several prints. Bottom/top thickness at 0.8, which is now an exact multiple of my layer height. I have been printing at 220 degrees and wonder if that could be a factor regarding the trash out of the sides. What do you think about printing just the first layer at 220 degrees and then dropping down to 210 or even lower? Do you have a suggestion? Last question. What is the difference between Skirt and Brim?

I printed this with a layer height of .06 mm. Shell thickness: .8 mm Bottom/Top thickness: .8 mm Fill Density: 20% Print Speed: 35 mm/sec Initial Layer thickness: .1 mm Printing temperature: 220 degrees. Obviously there is still something terribly wrong with my leveling. Even though my brim line amount was set at 7 lines, the brim is not at all visible on one side and barely noticeable on the other side. And what is the deal with those two diagonal printed lines on the build plate? This time there were no weird curves that could present problems for Cura. Everything is straight lines. What am I doing wrong now?

You are right, I am a bit of a perfectionist. Take a look at http://www.abrasha.com I have been working with 3D printing for some time (Shapeways) and looked at getting my own printer since early 2012. At the time I did not think that the quality/resolution of the output of available printers would satisfy me. Finally this year I thought that the quality had improved enough that I wanted to jump in. I am not at all disappointed, and realize that there is a limit in what any of these FDM printers can produce. I plan to use the printer mostly for making prototypes of my designs that will be produced in a variety of ways, i.e. hand fabrication, CNC machining, casting, high resolution 3D printing. I recently had this prototype Proof of Concept printed by Shapeways, which could never be printed on my printer. I'm fine with that. I'm not disappointed with the print of that power knob either. I have been able to get the first layer smooth, so I know I can repeat that. I just have to learn to be consistent. The moire pattern was a big surprise and I tried to figure that out with your help and others in this forum. Now that a few people seem to think that the issue may be with Cura and not me, I think I will send the STL file to Holland and ask their opinion. Maybe it will help them to improve Cura if that is in fact the cause of the problem. I knew that ABS prints can be smoothed out in Acetone vapor. I did not know that this was also possible with PLA and ethyl acetate. Thank you for that tip. I will give it a try. I've got plenty of bad prints to try it on, without fear of ruining anything. :smile:

In other news, ... I printed the sample tube again, this time at 230 degrees. It still did not come out perfect. This time things started to go somewhat wrong at 8 mm^3/sec, and then it got progressively worse, although not as bad as the previous attempt. The mistakes were only to the left and right of the area where the text is, as well as exactly where the text is, not on the opposite side. I can upload a photo to the appropriate thread. MeshLab was also not a great deal of help reducing the polygon count of the model. I followed the instructions on the Shapeways site exactly, and the best I could get was this. Different settings produced worse results.

I agree, of all the prints the one with the larger number of polygons is still the best. The reason the design of the knob has that subtle curve and the sloped top, is that I am copying the original power knob of my lathe, which is broken. I can't buy a knob off the shelf, and replacing it from the manufacturer in the Czech Republic is also not an option. I tried a couple of other slicers with bad results. I could not connect netfabb to the printer as it is supposed to via USB cable, and I was also not able to save the gcode after slicing, so I could not put anything on the SD card. From what I was able to find online, it seems that the version of netfabb I have does not support OS X very well or at all. I also tried slix3r for OS X. That also did not go well. This software seems to have quite a bit of a learning curve, I prefer the simplicity of Cura. The scariest thing was that the print head does not start in the same place as normally, but in the far back-left corner, and when the print started, the nozzle slammed into the metal clip that holds the glass plate in place. My sphincter did not like that. It is probably possible to avoid that, but I would have to figure out how to do that in the software. The infill was also pretty strange looking, nothing like the clean squares that you get from Cura, but very weird looking honey combs. I wonder if it would be helpful to send the STL file to Ultimaker and ask their support team what they think of it. Maybe it would help them to improve Cura if the moire pattern is in fact a slicing issue. Other than that, I think I will just have to experiment with a bunch of different settings for temperature and printing speed. This continues to be very frustrating.

pm_dude, It seems that you are not familiar with netfabb, it doesn't work that way. It needs to be connected to the printer via USB cable.

I don't know what temperature I printed at. I assume the printer's default. I did not make any changes. Yes. The shell was .8 mm I was also beginning to think that it might be a slicing issue. I have netfabb Studio for Ultimaker. Unfortunately I cannot seem to be able to save the gcode. In the Toolpath tab of netfabb the "Save as .GCODE" button is greyed out. I also see a large warning icon (red triangle with red exclamation point) in the main window. In the USB tab, I see the same warning sign. When I connect my printer with the USB cable and click "connect", something does happen. The light inside the printer goes off and back on, but netfabb still does not seem to see the printer. When I open the Warnings window, it says a number of times "no COM device found!", this was before I had connected the USB cable. After connecting the printer with the cable the Warnings window now says "Device detected but not ready!" How do I connect my printer to netfabb so netfabb can see it? I am running Mac OSX Lion, and the version of netfabb is Studio Basic for Ultimaker 4.9 (Demo) (Downloaded from the Ultimaker site.) How do I generate and save the gcode with netfabb? If I am successful in connecting the printer to netfabb, should I print from netfabb, or should I save the gcode and then open it in Cura to print? And finally, ... netfabb keeps crashing on me. It's now 2 AM. Time to call it a day.

gr5, I have done the UM2 Extrusion Test. My printer failed the test spectacularly! I have uploaded photos in the appropriate thread.

This is the result of printing the test on my printer. I have had this printer for a few months now, and I have yet to print a decent print. To say that I am frustrated is an understatement. I appreciate all the support a number of volunteers on these forums are providing so much. I would like to hear from Ultimaker what they have to say about this, and how they plan to provide support for this issue that is affecting a seemingly significant number of users.

gr5, How about I try my lower polygon count print with the following setting: Initial layer 0.3 mm Print speed 20 mm/sec What do you suggest I set the layer height at? I am mainly interested to see if I can get rid of the moire pattern. As you can see in the photo, not only was I not able to get rid of the moire pattern in the lower polygon count model, but this print now also introduced 7 vertical lines that are also present in the mesh. I did not have these lines previously. Previously printed part with .1 mm layer, printed at 20 mm/sec, .06 mm layer height.

Things turned out much worse than expected. I will post photos tomorrow. What surprised me more than anything else, is that event hough the initial layer was set to .3 mm instead of .1 mm as before, the bottom layer was full of under extrusions. The previous bottom layer of .1 mm was of much better quality (almost perfect) than the .3 mm layer. gr5 suggested that this would not be the case. I am now at my wit's end. This no longer makes sense at all.

illuminarti, Version 14.07.0 The last print came out with a pretty decent and nowhere near perfect "initial layer thickness" of 0.1 mm. The rest of the printed part is just as bad as the first ones I posted. The same under extrusion on the sides where the internal hole is and the same moire pattern. I will print my next attempt with a 0.3 mm initial layer and see what happens. Because I am now mainly curious if a dramatically lower polygon count reduces or removes the moire pattern and under extrusion around the hole, I have reduced the count from over 88,000 to 3,100. I will also increase the layer height from .06 to .3 mm, and the printing speed from 20 to 50 mm/sec. That way I can see a result in about 30 minutes instead of well over 4 hours.

gr5, I have created yet another mesh with much fewer polygons. Meshlab tells me it has 3,106 faces. I have uploaded it to my dropbox at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66542951/Lathe%20power%20knob%2005.stl When I open this file in Cura the entire surface of the part does not look very smooth at all as my NURBS model does. If I save it with even fewer polygons it only gets worse. Is it safe to assume that if the model does not look smooth in Cura, it will not print smooth either?

The print I am doing right now does not seem to have the issue on the side with the under extrusion mirroring the square hole inside the part, ... yet. But I still have the moire pattern even though I have exported a mesh from Rhino with much fewer polygons. So I downloaded and installed Meshlab, and now I have a new set of issues. When I go to Filters/Remeshing, Simplification and Reconstruction there are about 40 options to choose from. Since I really have no clue which one to pick I picked a few that made the most sense. The program crashes each time no matter which option I choose.

I am printing the same part again at the moment, and I am beginning to hope that I may be on the road to success. This is the first layer printing. It seems that I still have a leveling problem, but if you look closely at the first image I posted earlier today, you will see that the right side of the print is darker, i.e. thicker. So the leveling at that point was probably also not perfect. I am beginning to think, that because my "Initial layer thickness" is set to 0.1 mm leveling precision becomes much more crucial. But since that bottom layer was in fact very good I assume I can leave the leveling alone. I also turned "Enable combing" off as illuminarti suggested, and this has indeed eliminated the stringing in the infill. Since I also followed the suggestion to print slower I am now printing at 20 mm/sec. I still have about 4 hours to go to complete the print. I will report the result.

Last night I was finally able to start a print with a good bottom layer. However, after just a few layers the infill started to print. This photo was shot from the bottom. As you can see, the bottom layer is so paper thin, that light shines through. So this made me think that I was beginning to understand the meaning of the Cura setting Basic/Fill/Bottom/Top thickness (mm). This morning I increased the setting to increase the thickness of the bottom layer and started another print. I had made no changes at all to any other setting in Cura or any settings on the printer. I had not touched the printer at all. This was the result of the print: It seems that there is something wrong again with leveling as well as with filament feeding. I do not understand why the leveling is off, after I had just made a print last night where the leveling was correct. Why would leveling change overnight? And why would the filament suddenly not feed either. I went back to Maintenance/Advanced/Move material. Again the filament would not move when I rotated the knob after the nozzle had reached 210 degrees. Again the extruder wheel would rotate, but the filament did not move. I had to rather forcefully push the filament from the back into the extruder to make it move. This can't possibly the way this is intended to work.

In the Cura settings, how do Basic/Fill/Bottom/Top thickness (mm) and Advanced/Quality/Initial layer thickness (mm) relate to each other. Are these the same or different settings? They seem to be addressing the same setting, since when you mouse over Advanced/Quality/Initial layer thickness it says "Layer thickness of the bottom layer". If they are indeed addressing the same issue (layer) why does this need to be set in the Basic as well as the Advanced tab? If they are different, what is the difference? Under Basic/Fill/Bottom/Top thickness (mm) I keep re-reading "This controls the thickness of the bottom and top layers, the amount of solid layers put down is calculated by the layer thickness and this value. Having this value a multiple of the layer thickness makes sense. And keep it near your wall thickness to make an evenly strong part." over and over again. This statement makes no sense to me at all. It sounds like whoever wrote this uses "Layer height", and "Bottom/Top thickness interchangeably, and it still makes no sense to me. Can somebody please explain this.

Well, things have gotten from bad to worse, much worse. After updating to the latest Cura update and updating the printer firmware, I tried to print the part again, without having changed any print settings. The first layer printed much worse than when I last printed the part, which I posted on July 19 at 2:08 PM with a photo. The layer again printed with a lot of under extrusion. I can upload a photo, but that does not help much. I then adjusted the screws as had been suggested. This resulted in a slightly better print, but still with a lot of under extrusion. I then thought that it might be time to reset the printer to factory setting because of the new firmware, so I did the whole leveling procedure again. By now I have done that a couple of dozen times. Now this is the result of printing the first layer. I have had this printer several months now, and I have still not been able to get a decent print. I am beginning to think that it may not be me. BTW, I found what seems to be at the very least a typo in the new version of Cura. In the Advanced tab in the setting panel under Quality it says "Initial layer line with (%)". I think that should say "Initial layer line width (%)" BTW, I had it set to 120% to make sure I would not have under extrusion again. As you can see from the photo, that did not work. Print speed was set to 20 mm/s. It seems that there is not even any filament coming out of the nozzle. When I go to Maintenance/Advanced/Move material and I wait until the nozzle has reached a temperature or 210 and I then follow the instruction "Rotate to extrude", nothing happens. I can feel the wheel on the back of the printer rotating, but the filament does not advance. In the Basic tab, I do not understand the field Bottom/Top thickness (mm). In the explanation when mousing over the field for this it says "This controls the thickness of the bottom and top layers, the amount of solid layers put down is calculated by the layer thickness and this value. Having this value a multiple of the layer thickness makes sense. And keep it near your wall thickness to make an evenly strong part." This makes no sense to me at all. It seems that whoever wrote this uses layer thickness and layer height interchangeably. I wish there was a truly beginners guide for Cura as well as for this printer. I did not expect this to be easy, but this is ridiculous. I have mastered 3D modeling and rendering which I have been doing for 17 years, I expected this to be a lot easier than that.