philippe44

For me its more like, you fix one thing and another on flares up, but yeah I think my Girlfriend will leave me if I spent another night infront of my UM2 fixing it. I share your pain (I just received the upgrade kit today) but with the original one, after I decided to simply put the reel on the floor and let a good set of filament coils hanging to remove some tension, I saw massive improvment. I've replaced everything else before (feeder, bowden tube, filament guide, teflon insulator ...) without a consistent success. I'm under the impression that the (or some) filament when directly coming from the reel, is still too bent & stiff and is having too much friction in the teflon tube. You can easily feel that using a piece of bent filament and moving it into the insulator. Anyway, off topic and I know a lot has been already written about it, but just my 2 cents

I have both (FFCP and UM2). I only print PLA, so my experience would be limited to that, and this is just one opinion, I'm sure some will strongly disagree :-). - The UM print quality if absolutely much better than the FFCP, using same resoluton and spending a reasonable amount of time "tweaking" them (I'm not the kind that goes crazy spending days and days tweaking) - On the FFCP, w/o a glassbed, object adhesion is a real nightmare but *once you've upgraded to glass bed* is prints with an incredible reliability - it just prints, period - The UM2, for the first 6 month I got it, was a real joy. It printed with an incredible reliabilty with the high quality. Then, things started to derailed and more than one year later, they are still totally unpredictable. I've changed the teflon insulator, bowden tube (tried new material as well), tried different feeder, changed the nozzel, tried all sort of T°, printed all sort of improvment pieces to prevent the tube from moving while retracting filament, it just remains totally unpredictable and I'can't print above 0.1 mm. I mean by unpredicatble a lot of under-extrusion. Whatever I do, some prints go well (30-50%) and all the rest either fail or are unusable and I've never been able to find a pattern. I'm using UM material, I've not tried to go cheap - I recommended a UM2 to a friend before I had this problem, he bought it and had the exact same experience: worked incredibly well for a few month and then became a nightmare - I've ordered the UM2+ upgrade kit and see how it will work, I'd really like to have it back as it was at the beginning because it was so perfect ...