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chrisw

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Everything posted by chrisw

  1. I skimmed through your previous posts and didn't notice mention of how you're keeping the filament dry during prints, so I figured I'd ask. Do you have a dry container that sends material to the feeder, or is the spool out in the open? I overlooked this subject for quite a while early in my 3DP career because of low humidity in my area. Then we had high humidity weather come through for a month and I didn't connect the dots to realize it was a cause for some poor prints. Taking pains to keep filament dry helped out a lot once I got onboard with the idea. Best of luck in resolving your issue!
  2. What drew me to PETG at first was its ability to handle UV: I make a lot of parts that get used outdoors. You're right about the shattering when dropped on a hard floor. Some material manufacturers actually use the word "glass" in their product title for the stuff. However if the CAD design for a widget gets dawn up in a way that expects this, then the part won't break very easily. Solid PETG parts break, but if there are stress-absorbing structures, then the impact gets spread out and handled better. I liked printing the filament enough that it pushed me to learn better design processes so I wouldn't need to change over to some other UV-friendly filament, which are few and far between. Another positive point for PETG: Cold pulls are something I never need to bother with. PETG can sit in a nozzle or caked on a nozzle for hours, get gunked up as heck, but will extrude right out when a little heat is added. To clean the gunk off the nozzle, I just turn the hot end up to 240C, use a wire brush on the underside of the head and it's mostly clean again in short order. I haven't had such rosy experiences with PLA or ABS. Could be that I just need to practice more with those. Or I'm just lazy 🙂
  3. Next thing I'd look at would be print settings of speed, hotend temp, and nozzle size. Could the extruder be trying to push too much through a small hole at high speed?
  4. This is what I've been using for several years now. Individual spool link Case (10-pack) It's been consistently good quality filament that flows well in my UM2s with Bondtech extruders and 3D Solex blocks with .6mm matchless nozzles. A couple days ago I asked this company why they're out of stock on so many colors, and they said the demand isn't there for 3mm PETG any longer, so they're cutting down to Black only.
  5. First thing I would do is insert a.8 mm nozzle and change layer height to .35 mm. That will improve both print speed and IMO your chances of success greatly. Also fewer layers can strengthen the part in many cases. There may be more post processing required if you want a smooth exterior, but we're talking maybe an hour extra, whereas you'd be saving days worth of print time. After I started buying 1kg spools I never went back to anything smaller because I got tired of collecting spool cores with unused ends. 1kg+ spools should help you complete large builds with minimal filament changes required. Good luck on your speaker housings!
  6. Retractions and PETG just don't work well together. I've tried all sorts of settings in S3D to make up for dripped material by overpriming after retractions, but it never gives good results for me. My solutions have been to create models that need very few retractions, or to set retractions only for 10 mm+ distances, and to increase travel speeds. Or change to a different material
  7. I would use a caliper to check the filament size. If it's too fat for your bowden tube then it can cause the skipping. Also petg shouldn't require drying. Usually the bubbling and maybe dripping happens when the hot end is too hot. I haven't tried this Hatchbox brand, but usually the petg brands that I've tried run best in the 238 - 245C range.
  8. I wouldn't mind making the printable parts myself, but the hardware (screws, nuts, bolts, square rod, bearings, etc) are the types of things that I expect could be difficult to get just the right items. If those metal pieces all came in a bag I'd buy a couple of those bags. There are enough variations in metal parts that I'd rather get ones that you know fit your design well.
  9. I'm definitely interested in this setup, mainly for eliminating the in-tube binding that occurs when my UM2s are printing near the back wall. The sharp bend of the Bowden tube seems to cause too much friction. I still get functional prints, but there's uneven extrusion on the back wall area. Until recently this never mattered to me because all my parts were relatively small and I could keep them more toward the front. But then I bought a couple Matchless kits and realized I could print much bigger things in reasonable time when using a 1.5 nozzle. Now my prints occupy near the max build space sometimes. The ZGE setup looks like it could provide a more even flow. The only reason I'm not jumping into printing the ZGE parts is the size of that conversion project. It's a lot of parts and I don't have time to track down & order the hardware right now. If you ever put together a parts kit, I'll buy a couple
  10. Right up until the last couple of sentences, I was almost ready to try Cura again. I was hoping You can sort-of do this in S3D, but there's an annoying trait. Each time a new Process (different layer height) begins, S3D treats it as a new print. So if the bottom solid layers are set to 4, you get 4 solid layers, even though you're really in the middle of a print and don't need those. You can fudge around that by setting the middle Process to have 0 top & bottom solid layers, but then your print is screwed if there are any upper surfaces in that range because it'll be open-topped, showing the infill. This is where I hope @GR5 or @Neotko will jump in and tell me a trick for S3D to do what I've been unable to do thus far.
  11. I don't need this procedure ATM, however it made me think of more ways to customize gcodes to get exactly what I may need. So thanks for posting! It's always good to hear new ideas
  12. You're probably dealing with material being heated to the point of flowing for too long. The PC gets to the nozzle and sits there melted for a while waiting to get pushed through the tiny hole. This could be a good reason for changing to 1.75 mm filament, but of course hardware changes are necessary for that and it would not be a guaranteed fix. Would it be worth the time and dollars required to tinker for a possible improvement of print quality
  13. Heated bed update: My blobby soldered joint finally busted after about 20 prints. So I installed one of the $39 heated beds with the fake Ultimaker logo printed on it. It works, but it takes literally twice as long to heat up as a stock UM2 bed: 5 minutes to go from 22C to 76C on my stock UM2 bed, and 10 minutes on the 3rd party bed. FBRC8 sent me an email saying they now have the OEM beds in stock, so I think I'll just bite the bullet and get the real thing
  14. The best PC results I had involved using an enclosed UM2 and a thin film of superglue on the cold glass build plate, then heated the bed to desired temp after the glue dried. Lots of scraping with a razor blade was required to get all the glue off the plate after, but the parts stayed very flat on the plate during the build. Beware of glue fumes because they are potent. Or go back to more friendly filaments til better ones are developed (that's what I decided)
  15. Also I think I reduced the total retractions for this model in S3D by setting the minimum travel distance for a retraction to something like 7 mm. Good luck! It's satisfying when you get it working well and produce a real plane
  16. I printed a similar model from the same site, and it required some playing with settings and trying a few different filaments to get good results. Some filaments are more tolerant of retractions than others. These models can have retractions every 2 or 3 second continuously for minutes. It's a real world extruder torture test. Esun's PLA+ was the filament I settled on, pushed by a Bondtech extruder on a UM2. Simplify worked for me as a slicer, using mostly the settings suggested by the model's creator.
  17. Thanks GR5's store was the first place I went. No luck. He has UM2GO print beds but no full sized beds listed. Then I went to FBRC8 and discovered they have none in stock (I left my e-mail address there to be notified when they have stock, but haven't heard a peep). Then I tried Matterhackers and Dynamism, no luck. Shop3d.ca has the bed listed, with "In stock" next to it, but no price is showing and I don't see an "add to cart" option: Middle of this Page I'll keep his page in my links because there are quite a few replacement parts/upgrades
  18. I did that and it's working so far: two 5-hour prints at 75C with no errors so far. After soldering some globby-looking joints and then flipping the heat bed upside down for installation, I'm not feeling so confident. The wires are not exactly relaxed.
  19. How does your UM3's x/y accuracy compare to your UM2 and UM2go? I've read other pre-UM3 reports you wrote about the Go being the most exact. Is smaller still better?
  20. I get some curling on overhang corners using eSun PETG, but the fix is easy: slow down the speed to about 20 mm/s for a few layers (and drop the nozzle temp a few degrees). I've gone through about 45 rolls of their PETG and I keep buying more. It's been consistently good quality for me, and the parts have been strong.
  21. My 2,000 hour UM2 has been throwing the error about heated bed temp sensor off and on for a while now. I tightened the connections, which seemed to fix it for about a week, then I tried making the solder reflow, which seemed to help for 4 days. Now I'm over messing with it and would rather just replace that bed. I went to FBRC8's site to buy a replacement and they are sold out of the $197.00 beds. A quick search on Amazon shows $23.00 beds available, with the Ultimaker logo printed right on it. What's the best route to follow here? Does anyone know a reliable source for a quality replacement bed? TIA, Chris
  22. I just don't have warm fuzzy feelings telling me that Ultimaker recognized the issue of grinding bearings, addressed it across their company, and made it extinct. Back in 2015, Fabrc8 sent me a pair of actual buttery-smooth Misumi bearings (complete with a Misumi logo laser engraved on each one) as RMA replacements for a defective pair. At that time I figured UM had recognized the issue and taken action. So I was pleased. Then I ordered a pair of bearings from Fabrc8's site, just to have an extra pair on hand. These were plain brown box bearings, and they did not perform as well as the Misumi ones. So I think the performance of the bearings that Ultimaker buys and installs depends on the week. Some good batches, some not. And if they do maybe pay more for extra good ones now, I expect an accountant in their company will at some point convince them to save an extra couple dollars per system by going with a different supplier. And that's why I'd want an official statement that UM has recognized the poor bearings issue, owned it, and permanently resolved it. Or they could bring the overall price of the system down to the price point that would be appropriate for OK hardware, a price that would not make me expect high performance direct out of the box.
  23. Not in its current configuration. It would need an option of Bondtech feeders instead of the UM2+ carryovers. Anything I've seen available on the market right now is a downgrade from Bondtech. Also it would need a guarantee of only high quality Misumi bearings being used on the vertical rods. The no-name bearings can be unreliable, making for poor layer uniformity and a waste of my time in diagnosing/replacing
  24. http://www.matterhackers.com/ http://www.dynamism.com/ bargain bin of refurbished UM2 and UM2 Ext: http://fbrc8.com/collections/refurbished-printers
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