henri

I am not so impressed. Reading his description of bed leveling, he seems to have misunderstood the instructions, and some of his difficulties come from this. I found the leveling process easy and quick, and stays stable once it is done, unlike my original Solidoodle. He finds the Davinci more reliable, but I wonder how many other users agree?

I raised exactly this issue (except I think I needed 223.6 mm) and my piece was 219 in the Y direction, a 214 mm circle with a few bumps sticking out. see "Settings to achieve max build envelope" in this forum I was unhappy with messing with the end stops, but on the advice of iRoberti that's what it took. Physically bending the actuating arm.

The advantage of the US model is that support is here, and there is no hassle and delay from customs, or charge for duty. Maybe you are entitled to US support anyway, but you will lose some of the savings with transport costs. I was willing to pay up, and have not regretted it.

I have a print which just falls inside the stated print area of the UM2. Cura accepted it and it turned yellow. I centered it on the bed. When I printed it at the max X travel there was a clunk and rattle, and the next layer was moved to the left in the X direction. Next time I tried, I moved the model in cura as far left as I could get away with. No more clunk, but the model printed was missing a little bit at the max X position. I figure the discrepancy to be about 1.3 mm. There is clearly a mismatch between where Cura thinks the bed is, and its actual position. I do not like the idea of a hardware tweak (move the X axis end stop, or bend its actuator.) Nor do I want to edit Gcode. Advice would be appreciated.

I am probably one of the earliest adopters of the American made, or at least American assembled ultimaker 2. I had an early solidoodle at the time and was waiting to upgrade. The solidoodle is a much inferior machine, which is not surprising since it costs about quarter of the price of my ultimaker. However I was under a slight amount of stress every time I printed,and was not always satisfied with the results. I feel okay about the Solidoodle people because I bought the cheapest available fully assembled machine at the time specifically to start my education in this subject, and to sell it at that price they obviously had to make a lot of compromises. A friend in the same town had already bought an ultimaker2 , and I was very impressed but he had difficulties at that time with customs and some delays and so I put off upgrading. When the announcement was made of the American assembled machine, with a slight reduction in price, free delivery, and they threw in a couple of extra reels of filament this broke through my dedicated cheapskate attitude. I bought it from dynamism.com and found the experience quite satisfactory. They answered questions by phone, intelligent and friendly, and it arrived promptly and in undamaged condition. The first thing I made was a test piece to see how much I needed to shrink interlocking parts. The solidoodle needed up to half a mm, although it could probably have been improved if I were more adventurous about calibration. The surprising answer for the ultimaker was zero, my first parts just fitted. There was no blobbing or stringing at all. The only time i have seen any blobbing was when I was trying to work out why anyone needs 20 micron layers, so I made a 20mm tall Yoda, He had the great pox. I have mixed feelings about 3mm filament. There is less competition, and I am paying at least twice as much for plastic. It is very stiff, which causes problems when the reel is almost empty. However,retraction through a Bowden tube may be much better controlled. After 250 Mtrs or so I had a problem. The bed stopped heating. I had an error message which I thought said sensor error, but unfortunately did not write it down or take a picture. It may have said temperature error. It turns out that support is from the U.S. Assembler, fbrc8. I got prompt response (with an apology for being over 24 hours!)with lots of helpful tips on diagnosing the problem. I also looked at the assembly manual,which is so good I almost wished that I had bought a kit. The problem turned out to be a loose wire at the board connection. Easy enough to fix. When reassembling I noticed that the cable tie down clip did not adequately immobilize the bundle, possibly contributing to the problem . I just wrapped some black tape around it. I would encourage people to check on this, in case there are more examples around. Subsequently I had a different problem, failure of the pt100 board temperature sensor. Fabrc8 sent me a replacement board and wire, very fast turnaround. Probably because they do not have many thousands of machines out there yet, I judge service at the American supplier to be outstanding. I have now run 400 Mtrs through. I regard my experience as just about 100% positive.

Just received my machine. Interested in hearing from users nesr me.