jgowing

I have a new Ultimaker 2 with 50 hours usage. It has recently started making a clicking noise, whilst printing, which I think may be coming from one of the stepper motors. I have watched and listened to the printer carefully and I believe it is coming from the RHS stepper motor (facing the front of the machine). I think this is the motor that controls the left/right movement of the print head. The clicking has an average frequency of about 1 second with 50mm/sec print speed. So I am guessing the clicking happens with approximately 50mm of movement. It seems to happen in the middle of the X/Y position of the printing space. This could indicate or reflect the position where the printer has most naturally already seen the most usage and hence wear. Has anyone else seen this issue? Does it develop into something more serious? Is this an indication of a defective component or something that is wearing out early (component infant mortality).

I bought a Ultimaker 2 for Christmas and opened the box on 24th Dec. As others I paid full price and purchased from Adafruit. Now I see that just 11 days later my machine is out of date and the next generation is offered at the same purchase price. I just checked the Adafruit reseller return policy and they *** do not accept *** open box returns. So as I see it my machine has now instantly devalued and there is no recourse. This isn't a very satisfying situation to treat customers this way, particularly when they are buying a premium product at an already elevated price. In fact, this isn't OK at all and I am pretty irritated and discouraged. This is no way to engender customer loyalty. As of now I would not recommend Ultimaker to someone else based on this sharp practice. At the very least Ultimaker should offer a free or highly discounted upgrade kit to buyers who purchased within a limited time window. It's not as if Ultimaker provided any forward looking guidance or heavily discounted the existing Ultimaker 2 model. I feel as though this is an unacceptable way to dump the existing models in the run up to the holidays and leave customers burnt a few days later. It is not as if this is a low price, low margin product.