mevander

I've used UV-glues from Norton Adhesives in several different projects here at the university. It works pretty well and they have glues that are both heat and UV-curable which is great for parts that only partly are UV-transparent. You can find them here: http://www.techoptics.com/adhesives/optical-adhesives I can also recommend getting a hand-held UV-lamp like the dentists use. It's very convenient when gluing small stuff. In Sweden you can find it here: http://www.brotech.se/fusion-curing-light-blue/2960-0

That looks very nice. We've had problems with voids/defects in the nylon if we go over 230C. I'm guessing it's due to water in the nylon but we've tried to dry it in a 50C over so many times but it still doesn't get better. We also store it in an airtight box with desiccant beads with color indicators. Do you have any good recipe for drying it?

I'm curious to how they define heat resistant. Normally you state a glass transition temperature since it's a thermoplastics. Do they really mean that they have a Tg of 90C? Then it would be pretty interesting but also makes me wonder what the recommended printing temperature is? I guess I'll have to test it and see

Have you checked that your side fans are really running? I had a similar print and the connector for my fans had jumped out so I didn't have any cooling during the print. I didn't notice this until way later ...

Cura 14.09 in OS X. Should I post pictures of the results?

It seems that once you go over 0.15 mm layer height the lines are shown as separated in the analyzer. I'm guessing this might be on purpose to take into account that more material will "flatten" itself more?

I also checked the gcodes with http://gcode.ws/ showing interesting stuff. Ooh, that was an interesting site. I can't claim to understand gcode very well but if I slice a cube and leave all settings except change the layer height from 0.1 mm to 0.2 mm, the site goes from showing me a solid rectangle to a rectangle with separated lines. Should it look like that?

Hmm, would this mean that there is something critical in the head assembly that can create enough extra friction to make the feeder slip in a "normal" range of printing parameters?

Yes, I did experiment with loosening all of them and trying to just loosen the one closest to the hotend. It still went back to separating lines after 2-3 layers.

I tested this "trick" and while I see a temporary effect that improves the print, the threads go back to separating after a few layers.

Thanks Bas, that was very interesting. I think that one difference is that what we see here is at fairly low flow rates. My test box was printed at 4 mm^3/s and we've seen it at much lower flowrates too. If we go really slow, 0.05-0.1 mm layers at 20 mm/s we get very nice prints but that is also the only settings we can use more or less.

Ok, here's some new input from me. I did a test today with a test cube that always produces gaps. I printed it at 220 C and marked the filament at the beginning and the end of the print. I then did the same thing but let the filament go out into the air (without bowden tube or anything). I also took pictures of the filament pattern on the two runs. The amount of filament that was pushed through the hotend when printing the cube was 44.4 mm while the amount for the free filament was 51.3 mm! Cura says that it is supposed to be 51 mm. In other words, there seems to be a fairly large amount of slipping during the print. Here is the picture of the pattern on the "free" filament: and here is the pattern of the filament that went through the bowden tube and hotend: I unfortunately reversed the filament to get it out of the machine so there are two sets of pattern. There is still a pretty big difference in the patterns though and you can see that the "diamonds" are skewed. So, the question is how to solve this. More pressure on the filament? A better knurl pattern?

Thansk for the more detailed underextrusion explanation. I've tested the temperature and that is not the problem in my case. I've also tested measuring the temperature inside the hotend (without filament in there of course) and was a bit surprised to see it being 20C higher than what the machine thermocouple measured. I'm still measuring at a different place than the machine so I'm not too surprised that it didn't match but rather by the large difference in temperature . I've previously seen that when pushing the filament towards the feeder rather forcefully, separating lines can merge again and as soon as you release the filament they separate back again. I've always assumed that I would not be able to push more material this way (as the motor while being powered should prevent this right?) but rather that I helped the motor overcome some of the torque needed to work against the friction in the bowden tube. This would be an indication of #2 then I guess?

Same here. Can't print anything above 0.1 mm layer and 20 mm/s without getting open surfaces and have no problems getting 10 mm^3/s with the test cylinders. I feel that we're moving in circles here :(

And the previous round of test cubes that went round in this thread had 0.8 mm shell as far as I remember.