rowiac

According to Taulman, you are supposed to leave the netting on. It prevents the spool from unraveling. It has worked pretty well for me that way.

I'm not sure why Cura is doing that when you turn on brim, but you can try to adjust the z-position of the model to slightly below the build plate, e.g., -0.3mm or something like that, and see it still sits above the plate. I've done that occasionally when a part does not have a flat bottom.

Make sure your build plate is *perfectly* clean. Clean it with an alcohol-based glass cleaner and do not touch it with your bare fingers. I had a worse bubbling/lifting issue when I tried using silicone oil to lubricate the filament in the bowden tube.

Check for grinding of the filament since your feeder tension may have been too low . If it is grinding, ground up bits of filament could be causing the bowden tube to periodically jam up, so you could try blowing out the bowden tube as well.

@Zeno, Have you considered using an off-the-shelf bearing instead of making your own? There are all kinds of choices of bearings for around 5USD each and you wouldn't have to worry about printing material choice, just make it a nice press fit in the PLA.

There is a two-part high temperature silicone available: Smooth-On Mold Max 60, which can withstand up to 294°C. I have played around with high-temp red RTV silicone, but it is tricky to get it to cure with thick wall sections. One of the members here had recommended additives, such as corn flour, to improve curing however.

@gr5's advice is good, but whatever you end up doing to fix it -- my guess is it's the Z-linear bearings, because the same thing happened to me -- make sure to contact your Ultimaker reseller if your UMO+ is still under its 1-year warranty. I replaced my Z-bearings at my own expense and later found out they would have been covered under warranty.

Is there a reason you changed the default initial layer height of 0.3mm? Top/Bottom Line Width should also be set at 0.4mm, so you might want to check that. I believe the reason the default initial layer is so thick is to make it less sensitive to bed leveling. A thicker initial layer can absorb a varying gap between the bed and nozzle a bit better. Also check the feed rate on your printer and make sure it's set to 100%, not something higher. But otherwise I think you are correct in your assumption about what to expect from that single line laid down on the printer bed.

Throwing in my 2 cents...as has already been stated, 1.75mm conversion kits exist currently and some people are using them, but if the future does go that way, you know that the many more people would be doing the conversion and there would be a lot of support available for it in the UM community. You can already see the type of support available here for other innovations such as the Mark 2 dual extrusion and the ZGE systems. A 1.75mm conversion would be less complicated than these, I would think. In short, my guess is you would need to weigh printer design/print quality against future-proofing to make your purchase decision.

@Zeno I'm glad to see someone working on a dual extrusion mod for the UMO. I will be keeping my eye on this thread. Keep up the good work.

Meshmixer might work for you. You can create the primitive shape you want with a shell thickness of your choice. Then you can create a stencil to use with the surface sculpting tool. The stencil can only be black and white however. White areas in the stencil image will cause the surface to bulge out while black areas remain unaffected.

I'm pretty sure I was able to do this in previous versions of Cura, so maybe I'm doing something wrong. I'm using Cura 2.5.0 with a UMO+. I want to use the Move command to drop the bottom of the model slightly below the build plate because the bottom is not perfectly flat. I can move the model by dragging the blue "Z" arrow, but this is not very precise. Instead I want to enter a precise value in the Z dimension box, but when I enter a number (say -0.45 mm) it doesn't take and goes back to whatever setting it was at before I tried to enter a number. Any ideas what's going on?

My guess is also a partially blocked nozzle. Since the filament was bulged above the teflon coupler, it's probably not the coupler. Even so, you should consider getting a spare coupler and nozzle since they do wear out. I had a persistent problem with clogs and under-extrusion and changing the nozzle is what finally fixed it.

@Leech_of_society, Why not try Cura? It's free and way more user-friendly than slic3r.

@devedean, It looks like the origin of the part (the RGB triad) is far away from the part itself and may be fooling Cura into thinking it takes up more space that it actually does. Can you move the part closer to the origin using 3D Builder and then try again with Cura? Unfortunately I'm not very familiar with 3D Builder, so I can't tell you how to do it.

And also be sure to try shift-click to select multiple items, then click the move tool and drag the selection around with the colored arrows to move them in the x and y directions, as was mentioned previously. That has worked for me when I have encountered the same issue.

@gr5, It would be 80°. I believe the default is 45°, but I have mine set to 50° all the time and go higher sometimes as you suggest to reduce unnecessary support. Maybe at some point Cura will allow modification of support directly. I'm not ready to cough up the dough for S3D yet. Cura is so good (and getting better all the time) it is hard for me to justify.

@kervert, Wow, that roller was in bad shape. Mine wasn't quite as bad, but it still caused problems. The acrylic roller should last a while, but I ended up replacing mine with the ball bearing that @amedee mentioned. It was less than $3 on ebay; size 8mm ID x 14mm OD x 4mm W.

Have you tried flipping it over 180deg (legs sticking up)? It'll only take a minute for Cura to tell you if that's better or worse. With supports touching the top, however, you will get some marks on those surfaces, but a little sanding could take care of that.

@0235: Thanks for the follow up. That may help others in the future.

I have had good luck with ProtoParadigm ProSpec PLA in Marble White and other colors. I have not tried black yet. Besides the price being right, the material is good quality and uniform in dimension. The material seems less brittle than other PLAs. I had one problem with the coil getting tangled resulting in a failed print, but that has been only one time out of maybe three 1kg spools. On my UMO+ I print at 200°C and standard Cura print speeds with 60°C bed with good results.

Sorry to tell you this, but Meshmixer is an Autodesk tool too...but at least it's free. :( :(:(:( Wonder how long the Free part will last with those clowns. From what I heard, the main developer of Meshmixer left the company, but they have had a couple of version releases since then recently. Some of the functionality has been incorporated into ReMake, but that's not as easy to use--and costs money. I hope Autodesk keeps their maker-oriented free tools available, but I've already seen some of them being discontinued, such as the 123Dapp site.

Sorry to tell you this, but Meshmixer is an Autodesk tool too...but at least it's free.

@packy_gis, 3ds Max is a powerful tool, but I haven't been able to spend much time to learn it yet. However, a tool that I do have more experience with is Meshmixer. Although it is a free tool, I was able to use it to extrude your STL file and add a closed off flat bottom, making it a water-tight model for printing. If you decide to try Meshmixer, the basic steps to accomplish this are: 1) Ctrl-A to select the entire model 2) Edit / Extrude; extrude in the Y-direction with an Offset of about 100mm; Accept and Clear Selection 3) Edit / Plane Cut; move cutting plane to where you want it and Accept 4) Analysis / Inspector / Auto Repair All to clean up the model You will have to be a bit patient for your computer to process each step because this file is big (~3.8 million triangles)

You can try trimming off a bit of the end of the bowden tube to make it square against the teflon coupler again. You will need a very clean cut with an X-acto knife or razor blade.