Sealcat

Hi again! So, I did the test again, now with the cover removed. I also lightened the pressure on the filament, the teeth marks look a lot better now, two clear lines of dots. The underextrusion started earlier this time, around 7 mm/s, I assume because of the lighter pressure on the filament. Around then I started to push it in manually, and the print was a lot better from there on to the end. There still was some holey parts in the 10 mm/s area, but considerably less than in the first print. I didn't see any strange movement on the stepper motor (it's very possible I missed something though) or grinding on the filament. The print to the right is the new one, compared to the old one to the left. Do you have any suggestions for more well known objects to print? I thought about the benchy boat, but it seems a bit big for the purpose of testing extrusion. Thank you!

Thank you very much for the answers! So I probably don't need to worry about the flashing screen and sound? It does concern me, but I haven't had any other problems with the software. I finally had som time to try out these methods at least. So, I changed the temperature to 230 C, did some atomic nozzle cleaning and ran the flow test you provided, Torgeir. I didn't understand what cover to remove to observe the stepper motor though, but I didn't notice any immediate strange movement duing the print. At 9mm/s the plastic starts to get very thin, a bit transparent, and at 10 mm/s it's held together by hopes and dreams in some places. It's better than I expected though, and I didn't hear any grinding/skipping back from the feeder duing the entire print. It did grind when I switched the material after the atomic method though. What should I take from the result? Just for the sake of trying I made a small, more advanced print with support structure and retractions. The quality is actually worse than before, I assume because of the higher temperature, but there was no feeder skipping at least. It seems to be very inconsistent in what amount of material it extrudes, it's either too much and gets zits/stringing or these thin sections with small holes, mostly on the support structure. For the print(s) that failed earlier the print speed was 60 mm/s, layer height 0.1 and nozzle 0.4, so the volumetric would be 2,4 mm^3/s? It seems quite low. I didn't change the retraction for this print, it's set at 4.5 mm in length and 25 mm/s in speed on the printer itself, in Cura it's enabled but the boxes for retraction length/distance are greyed out for some reason? Should I try to go even lower than the 4.5 mm in retraction? I forgot to loosen the screws on the feeder before the flow test print, but did it afterwards and a couple of them we're really tight so hopefully it did something good. Thanks again for the help, it's tricky to find the problem with all these factors playing in! You think you're starting to understand something, then you find ten more things to consider.

Thank you! It's just unfortunate that I had to join because of problems instead of pure printing joy. I uploaded the picture the way you said in the first post, and added another one that hopefully gives some more insight into the problem. It has small holes, zits and stringing in the support structure and infill, but none or very little on the objects (if they get finished). I've realized that the tension between the knurled wheen and the filament is a bit too high, the teeth marks in the filament seems too deep. I've mucked around with the tension quite a bit before, both lowered and hightened it, but it didn't make much difference either way. The white marker on the side of the motor is at the top though, so I thought it was fine. Should I lower the tension? This is the piece of filament removed after the print in the pictures failed, the knurled wheel has ground in the filament quite a bit. I brushed out the filament dust from the feeder motor as well as it was possible without disassembly. The sound at startup seems to be too faint for my camera to pick it up, I made another recording of just the sound. It's quite hard to catch, you'll probably need to turn the volume up a bit. The first click is the printer being switched on, then you hear the little screaming sound for a few seconds (at the same time as the screen flickers). http://vocaroo.com/i/s1AcOGXlGU12 I hope it could just be a loose cable somewhere? Thank you for the help!

Hello! I'm fairly new to the magical world of 3D-printing and recently bought a used Ultimaker 2 with the intent of upgrading it to a 2+ some day. From the start I had problems with feeder skipping, I managed to get at couple decent prints but the support structures (auto generated from cura) was always stringy and had small holes in it, and larger prints (10+ hours) failed as the filament stopped extruding. I tried incresing temperature, increasing the feeder tension slightly, lowering speed and cleaning both the feeder and the nozzle with no noticable difference. So, I switched the PTFE-coupler and the filament to a brand new roll of colorfabb white PLA, but the problems actually seem to have gotten worse. The feeder doesn't tick quite as often, but it stops extruding despite a seemingly clean nozzle. I've managed a 6 hour print at most. Could the something else be worn out, or is there a clog somewhere despite doing the athomic method? Does the problem simply lie with the settings? In what end should I begin? 3 hours in on a 10 hours print, standard Ultimaker 2 PLA-settings. 210 C, 60 C bed, 60 mm/s, 100% fan. What I'm most concerned about though is something weird the printer does at intial startup, the screen flickers in blue for a few seconds and a high-pitched screeching is heard. Could there be a problem with the electronics, and is something like that even possible to fix? A video of how it looks: http://tinypic.com/r/no659i/9 I'm at a loss how to tackle these problems. Any help would be much appreciated!