danilius

You might want to reduce your print temperature, and increase the retraction length and speed. This will vary from filament to filament (even from the same manufacturer), so be prepared to experiment.

@DidierKlein, you are right, the models are largish. Still amazes me though. @lRobertl, I did try enclosing the printer and printed at 260C, but it did not make a huge difference. PLA can clearly take way more of a beating than ABS. On the other hand, for master models that will be used for casting, I use ABS since the surface finish is way superior for some inexplicable reason.

I recently fitted an olsson block to my UM2, printed out this shroud and fitted that, then kept my machine working 24 hours a day, as usual. After some silly mistake I discovered I was printing an ABS part without the fans on, and amazingly the print came out absolutely fine. So I continued printing without fans. Well, imagine my surprise when one fine day I accidentally did the same thing with PLA, printing a part without the fans on. The print came out just fine. On the next print I turned the fans on out of curiosity and can't really say it made an appreciable difference. So I have been printing both these materials now without fans and gotten really great results from the last 30-40 prints, although delamination on ABS is still an issue. PLA can take a heck of a beating before it snaps, and it does not really delaminate. Can anyone explain this phenomenon; extra points if you avoid explanations that mention pixies, little green leprechauns or Hogwarts?

The tongue was there to inspire you to even greater heights.....

Also, here is a practical use of your sculpture, a coat hook. Or somewhere to hang up your carcasses, or parts thereof perhaps.

Weeeeeelll, thar's your problem, mate. Thanks for the upload, I downloaded it, removed the lower geometry and stuck a plane on the back. You can use the "Cut off object bottom" function to reduce the thickness of the bottom. You can find it here. This way, Cura takes care of filling things out nicely, as long as you don't need the hollow at the back. It also removes the internal overlaps from the lower geometry. Also, you

Buy one stick of each brand you can find and try them out. That's what I did. OK, I pinched the UHU stick from one of my kids, OK, but I did buy the other ones that did not work

Learning how to level the bed was the hardest thing to achieve for me. You have to babysit your prints at first until you are confidant. After that, once your bed is levelled you will rarely have to do it again. Even if you move the machine around, or hold it upside down to retrieve a lost part, and you are hearing the voice of experience

For PLA I now uses UHU stick glue. It's a real pain to get the part off the bed, but it works really well. For ABS, I have not found anything that works as well as ABS juice. Applying it is easier if you use a puck. I remove the glass from the machine, scrape off the old dried juice and then apply juice - not just acetone - to the glass using the puck. It does not seem to work all that well for PLA, and nylon comes right off.

The simplest solution is not to use a brim. For the model you posted you simply don't need one. Also, as has been mentioned, fans have to come on slowly. So, allow several layers for the fans to ramp up speed.

https://www.youmagine.com/designs/another-spool-holder-base seems to me easy and practical device The bearings are easy to find on ebay, just search for 608 bearings. You will need some M8 bolts as well. With an external bearing based spool holder you can position your relative angles as you wish!

Instead of printing off-roll, buy some cheap 608 bearings and print yourself a low-friction spool holder. It will also reduce the amount of waste that is inevitable when cutting short lengths off rolls.

I bought an olsson block recently from @swordriff, and in my opinion it is the No1. upgrade for the Ultimaker. If you are going to do anything to your UM2, it's got to be an olsson block. Now go all the way and fit Robert's feeder as well. Once you have the olsson block and Robert's feeder in place you will wonder why they have not become stock UM2, the difference is that huge. Blocked nozzle? 20 seconds to get back to printing with the olsson block. Change your filament mid-print? 20 seconds with Robert's feeder.

Wall thickness and layer heights play a role too, so you might want to experiment with that as well.

You might want to drying out the filament first, which is simple enough. Put it in a plastic bag somewhere really warm with some desiccant beads or rice. Next, try printing really slowly, around 25mm/s or 30mm/s and this bit is important: watch the print. This might give you an important clue as to what is happening. Finally, and this is something I think I will be saying a lot in the future: get an Olsson block and two or more 0.4mm nozzles. That way you can change your nozzle in 20 seconds and eliminate the single biggest problem.

I was just printing some really small parts to the extreme right of the UM2 bed, and when cool head lift kicked in the head crashed into the bearing on the right and got pushed off-course in a big way. Anyone seen this before?

I have had little success with printing directly on to glass. Invariably parts would suffer from lift somewhere. For PLA I have used cheap no-name brand glue stick which was fine for smaller parts at 65C. I tried UHU glue stick for PLA at 65C, and that was really good, but I experienced lift when I was too lazy to clean the plate and simply coated over the dirty stuff. The only drawback with UHU glue stick was that the parts would not come off easily after printing, I had to wait until the plate was cool, and for larger parts apply a large sideways force (i.e. hitting it with a plastic rod). The UHU stick glue was re-usable for at least a week, meaning that every Sunday I cleaned the glass with hot water and recoated. For ABS (which I have been using exclusively now for the past month) I tried cheap glue stick, UHU stick, hairspray and ABS juice. The only thing that gives me consistent results is ABS juice. The drawbacks with that is that the juice comes off with the print, the plate has to be re-coated once there is no unused area left, plus cleaning the plate is a royal pain. All the old stuff has to be scraped off. Applying juice is a little tricky. Using a brush means that the brush will becomes stiff once the juice dries. If you want to re-use the brush you have to soak it in acetone for a while. Also, using a brush does not result in an even coat. This is not really a problem, but it would be nice to have an easy-to-apply method that result in an even coat. So currently I am trialling a very thin ABS juice (low ABS to acetone ratio) and I pour it onto the plate directly from the bottle. I move it around a little with an implement (or my fingers - but don't tell anyone) to make sure every part of the glass is wetted. Once that is done, I tilt the glass until the ABS juice sits evenly, and the surface tension is sufficient that it does not run over the edges and a fair amount of juice can be applied. It takes approximately 15 minutes to evaporate leaving a relatively even coat. I have a pump spray bottle that might make this process easier, but have tried it it since I do not know if the acetone will attack the bottle or the pump parts.

It's difficult to tell clearly from your pictures what's going on, but it looks like your top surfaces are too thin, and you need to increase the retraction length, and maybe the speed as well.

I'm not really sure how useful that information is. Since I and others have found that different colours from the same manufacturer behave differently, the most important piece of information a new user needs is: "be prepared to experiment". In other words, no manufacturer can guarantee you that their settings will work out of the box for whatever model you print. That's the reality right now, and the quicker a use internalises that, the quicker they will be able to achieve results they will be willing to accept.

Even in red plastic this looks awesome cool.

Thanks for that. B&Q write "Simply apply with a spray and leave for 25-30 minutes to dry - a great way to revamp your home". So I'm buying 1,000 of these and spraying my walls with that.

I'm using 15.04 and this model looks fine in layer and x-ray view.

If you want high quality, you have to print much slower, around 30mm/s. At that speed you are probably best off printing at roughly 190C, maybe a little higher, you will have to experiment with that. Having said that, you are probably not going to get dramatically higher quality even if you drop down to 0.1mm layer height, when printing with PLA. Once you have printed around 100 objects and you are comfortable with the machine and 3D printing in general, switch to an opaque ABS with a matte surface finish (I know, tricky to find) and you will get significantly superior results.

What did you use to get that lovely golden finish?

...or the button for the secret door to the batcave.