jonatanrullman

I was under the impression that the TFM coupler only lasted about 1000 hours, which of course is still a major improvement. Oh well, both my printers are already upgraded with I2K and I hope soon to print more abs so perhaps it is just as well. :-)

That would be with i2k then, right? I will adjust my calculation for heater and sensor to 3500 hours. Do you have any other suggestions for my list? Cheers

Agreed. But my point is that if you are concerned that an open source printer from a well established and respected company is going to cause you trouble if they go bust you are most likely looking at mission critical deployment. If Ultimaker go bust and you have an UM2 at home (like myself) for your personal use and for acquaintances then you won't have a problem with spending a little time replacing the feeder (for example) with a third party solution that works about as well if you are unable to source a genuine part. Like I said. Very few parts on an UM2 would be impossible or even very hard to find suitable (albeit perhaps not identical) replacements for if the genuine article is unavailable. There are even a few threads on this very forum from people who have tried to build their own from scratch. Though I should point out that I think such a venture will either produce a machine of inferior quality or not really save any money compared to buying a complete. But that is another matter. As for parts you should have laying around in case of emergencies that will be a question of how critical your printer is. For me, having a working printer was critical enough that I bought two. And it has saved me quite a bit of grief. But it comes at a price... If you can live with the printer being unusable for say a week then I would say that you don't need to have anything lying around at all. With two notable exceptions. 1. If you don't have an I2K, or even if you do, an extra teflon coupling isn't a bad idea. 2. If you are using a printed fan shroud (I use laberns and I highly recommend it) you should have an extra since failed prints tend to scrap the shroud. Other than that I don't think it is worth to have extras of everything lying around unless you really rely on your printer. I recall gr5 or perhaps it was Neotko mentioning that the printer was so critical that he had a whole bunch of extras lying around to assure it wasn't unusable for more than hours unless the very worst happened. Not all parts will fail without warning. You will most likely have some time to prepare for replacing bearings and rods or belts. Some other parts may fail without warning but cost serious money (like the control board). If you are looking for the middle road between having just the very basics and having a complete extra printer and don't mind shelling out $100 on spares just in case then I would get a bowden tube, teflon coupler, nozzle, heater, pt100 thermocouple and a fan shroud if you are using a printed one. But personally I would think even that is overkill. None of those parts are proprietary and all are easily obtainable, Ultimaker or not. Cheers

I don't think Ultimaker going out of business is a real concern except for warranty issues. For one I don't think they will be going out of business. But lets take the fatalistic view and for a moment say that they do. I agree that open source does not help in every case but I believe that every single part on my list is available from a third party source and much of the general components are standardised. The only components I can think of that could possibly break unless you drop the printer and that are not generally available from a third party or as a compatible solution that will make do are the control boards and possibly the heated bed. And both of those are manageable by switching to a different control board and replacing the bed with an aluminium sheet and a silicone heater. The components are not standard but their function is. Everything else will either be parts that are unlikely to break (like the enclosure), available from third partys (like teflon coupler and nozzles), possible to manufacture yourself or using contacts either as a straight copy (like the aluminium plates in the head) or compatible part (like an IRobertI feeder) or picked up from the same manufacturers that Ultimaker use (like stepper motors and rods). Of course, this is entirely separate from issues like how easy any of the above is if standard parts can't be ordered straight from an Ultimaker reseller. But then again, if that is a deal breaking concern you are most likely a medium sized company with mission critical need for the printer and as such will just buy a new one from a company that is still in business and will provide you with support. I wouldn't worry about it.

With my 2/3 rule that would equate to an expected lifetime of 9000h. Do you think it can be safely increased? Also. I would be great to hear about rods, belts, heater elements and such on the two printers. Two 6000h+ printer should give some useful data. :-)

A couple of days ago I sat down to sort this question out as well as I could. I wanted to be pessimistic about the longevity of parts because this calculation was for being able to give a price to people for commission prints. Thus I would like the calculated lifetime of every part to be about 2/3 of the expected. I would love to get some input on everyones experience of lifetime of parts so that I can make the calculation better. I might even have missed something though I think it is fairly complete. Please allow me to reiterate. These are PESSIMISTIC approximations and NOT based on enough data. Most often they are GUESSES which I have then halved. 1. Printer itself Comment: This is until it something expensive breaks or general wear makes the printer unsuitable for commercial use. This also includes fans as they are normally rated at about 50000h and thus should outlive the printer. Lifetime: 6000h 2. Fan shroud Comment: I use laberns fan shroud which takes a beating and needs replacing quite often. Using the original fan shroud this can be ignored completely. Price: $4 Lifetime: 100h 3. Teflon coupler (with I2K) Comment: The I2K should not require replacement for the lifetime of the printer. Swordriff claims more than 1000h at 260 degrees celsius so 1000h is probably a suitably pessimistic calculation. Price: $21 Lifetime: 1000h 4. Nozzle Comment: Non abrasive materials. Most wear will probably be external. Price: $14 Lifetime: 500h 5. Heater+PT100 Comment: Swordriff claims that these are consumables but I assume that they will hold up for quite some time. Price: $52 Lifetime: 1000h 6. Rods and linear bearings Comment: This is probably one of the most pessimistic estimations as well as the most expensive part. Price: $80 Lifetime: 1500h 7. Bowden tube Comment: Mine show significant wear after about 1000h so I think that this one is fairly realistic. Price: $20 Lifetime: 1000h 8. Belts Price: $15 Lifetime: 2000h 9. Other A catch all for other stuff. About $20 per 1000h 10. Electricity With heated bed the machine may use as much as 200W during prints. Calculate accordingly. 11. Bed stick material (hairspray, tape, glue etc) Probably about $10 per 1000h. Cheers

Wear is primarily going to manifest itself as under extrusion. Friction builds up in several places and at some point it can't keep up anymore. This is especially true for the non geared feeder on the UM2s. Adding a gearbox will help. Alot. Meduza has an excellent design and I believe that gr5 has done a version of it as well. I have remade my own version with a range of improvements but I have not gotten round to posting it yet. The bowden tube and nozzle is going to wear out. Though that will take quite a while so if yours was new then that is probably not a major issue for some time. The thermal paste will also go bad. I can't say how quickly though but every once in a while its a good idea to dismantle the head completely, clean everything and apply new paste between the steel coupler and the lower part of the heatsink and bottom plate. Be sure to use something that can stand the temperatures, regular thermal paste for computers won't cut it. I used copper paste that was advertised for use with car brakes. I think the main culprit here is the teflon coupler. At 240 it is going to deteriorate quite quickly. I don't think you would get more than a couple of hundred hours out of it. My first teflon coupler, which was almost new when I bought my second hand UM2, I used at something like 230 degrees and I think it lasted about 200-250 hours. I would suggest that you dismantle the head and have a look at the coupler. The bottom part will most likely be burnt and it is probable that you will find that the hole has decreased in diameter. This causes quite a bit of friction but can be dealt with by cutting off a small slice. This can be done a couple of times before the coupler needs replacing altogether. I would however suggest another course of action as well. Since you are in the US, have a look at gr5s store at thegr5store.com and search for the i2k spacer. Well worth the investment, especially if you are going to print at those temperatures. And replace the coupler when you're at it as well, so that you are starting fresh. As for cleaning. The nozzle looks a bit ragged. I have an olsson block on my printers to I simply heat up and remove the nozzle and do an atomic pull with it loose. Otherwise you can do an atomic pull in the regular fashion. Doesn't hurt to do it once in a while. The exterior of the nozzle I usually clean with a bit of paper towel as needed. On a related note. You might also want to look into replacing the fan shroud. It was designed for the dual extruder upgrade that never got past beta and as such it is less than perfect for single extruder I'm afraid. I've been using Laberns fan shroud pretty much since day one and it works incredibly well. Though I always have a spare one on hand because if something goes wrong in a print the shroud will take quite a bit of damage and will need replacing. I hope I covered all the ground and didn't make it too confusing. I'm sure others with more experience will chime in as well. Cheers

I just had the weirdest 3D printing experience. I had twelve parts printing on my UM2. After a mm or so one part came loose but everything else was looking so great that I decided to let it run and see if it would just air print and get all the other parts out fine anyway. This worked alright up to about 10.5mm at which point the printer went complete haywire. It got to the bad part (probably a coincidence) and all of a sudden in went straight forward until it came to the very front of the printer, all the way laying a string of plastic at about the usual rate. It then returned and continued printing the next part in line. However, it laid an almost solid layer instead of infill. It then continued laying parts at the rights spots but I noticed more of the solid instead of infill. Later, can't remember if it was the same layer or one layer later it moved very slowly in a straight line for perhaps 5 seconds while pumping out masses of plastic, like it was priming. At the same time the display was wobbling like crazy. After this is continued laying layers almost perfectly for all other parts, but like it was several layers ago (about 5mm, this in fact appears to be the cause of the solid layers instead of infill I mentioned earlier) because some parts had tapered off or had bevels and such and it was laying plastic in the wrong places. At first I thought it had lost steps but it was perfect on all sides and parts where the perimeter had not changed. This continued for another full layer while I was sitting there looking amazed. It then started going slowly again on the same part but this time it retracted the filament halfway back through the bowden tube. Again, the screen was going back and forth several millimeters to each side). It then continued as it should, feeding the filament through the tube in the normal rate, though obviously nothing came out of the nozzle. At this point I started filming but it didn't happen again for a couple of layers and I got tired of holding the phone up for severalk minutes. So I cancelled the print and I am currently printing all the parts in a couple of batches. I should mention that I am running Cura 2.5.0 on Mac but Thinkergnome (can't remember which version but it is a couple of months old). I have run these versions for hours and hours without problem. I printed at least 20 hours this weekend on that printer alone and a couple of hours more on my other one. I really have no idea what happened.

Of course. But they're still excellent prints coming out of i3 printers. If you want it is possible. That not everyone will have the knowledge, experience or whatever to make it so is pretty irrelevant to that statement on its own and even more so when taken out of context as in your quote. I think the rest of that paragraph made it clear that getting excellent prints from an i3 comes at the price of tinkering and the not so much price of the initial investment. Which is pretty much the opposite of an UM2 or UM2+. Cheers

No, it would likely not require supports at all to look good. Though the top is flat rather than round or pointed as it looks in the picture so I'm not entirely certain. And since this is the base of a 24 hour print display piece and supports only take an extra minute or so I wanted to do it with all bells and whistles to be on the safe side. Cheers

Half way through my print I noticed that the print head had knocked away the support structures quite violently. I let it run because there's a chance it would work alright. Like notoriously overconfident theme park operators before me I was somewhat surprised that my UM2, uh, found a way. How do you like them reliabilities? (Sorry, I couldn't resist paraphrasing another famous movie quote)

This seems like a rather odd question in many ways, as StephanK was on about. The prusa is about €750, much less for the really cheap clones and still substantially less for the pretty good clones. An UM2+ used is at least €1200, new they are more than €2000. An UM3 clocks in at about €3600. We're not talking apples and oranges here. Reminds me of The Big Bang Theory. It's a little wrong to call a tomato a vegetable, it's very wrong to call it a suspension bridge. Sure, both are 3D printers but even if we suppose that an i3 could compete with an Ultimaker, it's still a pretty big price span to look at. That said, I have seen some really excellent prints coming out of i3 printers. But it does come at a price. Or rather, it doesn't. As you have noticed, an i3s aren't plug and play. They are good but more of a tinkering model, as Stephan noted. And if I may voice an unpopular opinion, the hot end leaves quite a bit to be desired, even if we only focus on print quality. Now, an Ultimaker on the other hand, is a well honed precision instrument. I found it hard to really understand the difference it made before I got one and sure there are a few bad points too, quite apart from the hefty price tag. Especially if you get en UM2 as I did, the 2+ made things better. So an Ultimaker will require a slight bit of tinkering as well. And the bowden system instead of direct drive does come with certain drawbacks. However, there are so many points in favour. I don't have time to list them all but a few: *I doubt very much that you will be able to get close to the print speeds the UM2 does on a Prusa no matter what simplify tells you. *The hot swap nozzle feature of the Olsson block is pure gold. I can't do without it anymore, no way. *It is fairly quiet for a 3D printer. *It looks great. *Print quality is ridiculous. *Cura has predefined profiles, just pick one, do a few minor adjustments and it will work excellent if you don't have time to go into the deep end. Haven't tried Simplify yet but I hear it is great. To follow Stephans excellent list. This is what I have done to my UM2. Many of these things are upgrades that came with the UM2+ already so keep that in mind. *Fan was pretty loud so I replaced it with a much quieter. *Led strip worthless, replaced with new. *Trimmed the PTFE coupler after a few hundred print hours because of slight deformation. *Have bought I2K spacer but not mounted yet. *New fan shroud (Labern) *Geared feeder (Meduza) *New extruder and drive gear (IRobertI) *Leveling feet *A spacer for screws because they were 3mm too long and interfered with the new fan shroud *Olsson block (mine came with it actually, but many don't) *New spool holder Basically all of these were upgrades I made to make it work even better, some more important than others. Only actual repair I did was the PTFE coupler. But it basically worked wonderfully straight out of the box. Literally. Even though it was second hand. You won't be able to use 1.75mm filament without some serious modifications. I will do it eventually because my filament supplier tells me he will be phasing out 3mm filament over time and tightly wound coils when spools are almost empty create a bit of trouble. But it will cost about €100-150 or so. Good news is that if you decided to go with a cheaper used UM2 instead of a 2+ and you didn't get the olsson block, that €150 upgrade would also get you that. To summarise my thinking here. If you have say €1200-2500 lying around and want the best printer that money can give, buy an UM2 or UM2+, used or new depending on availability and preference. If you have €3600 lying around and want something even better, I think it will be hard to beat an UM3, although I would take my time and check out the competition that is in that price range as well. But I doubt there is any serious alternative. If you feel that the prices above are more than you would actually want to spend on printing, give it some serious thought if you should instead invest the time in getting the Prusa as good as it can be. Cheers

Thanks. Not exactly what I was looking for and SyntaxTerror is hooking me up with the stuff I need. Would have been better than buying the complete kit though. Cheers

It isn't playing with words. It is absolutely necessary not to confuse the terms. Seriously. I did understand what you said, problem is that probably wasn't what you intended. You said warranty, but I assume that you meant legal guarantee. There's really no telling though. You might actually think that it is illegal to deny a warranty claim as you said. The results of that mixup is usually not bad. They usually don't matter in fact, because often they can be used interchangeably or people understand the intended meaning. But do yourself a favour and never try to write a legal contract (like a will or a prenup) using apparently interchangeable terms without understanding their meaning. The debate was closed long ago. I won't be reading this thread anymore.

See. Chill and let Sander sort things out. :-) He has a "van" in his name. And a magnificent beard. What else could one expect. ;-)

Again. Please, please, PLEASE, do not confuse warranty and legal guarantee. It is entirely legal to refuse warranty based one the colour of someones trousers if you really wanted to. But of course if you saw a warranty statement including that provision you may want to consider if that is in fact the manufacturer you want to deal with. Warranty is a voluntary agreement between the manufacturer and the end customer. Legal guarantee is mandatory by law. They are two entirely different things and should not in any way or under any circumstance be confused or used interchangeably. You may argue however that it is bad business practise but that is another question entirely. Can we just put the jurisproudence to rest in this matter once and for all and wait for Ultimaker to get back on this issue? Cheers

Well, that would be a reseller and not Ultimaker themselves. Wait a while for Sander to weigh in and see what the official response is. Otherwise contact Ultimakers own support to see what they think. From a purely jurisprudential perspective, based on my best guess about french law from my experience of EU law, I would say that this is the correct (loosely speaking) way of going about the problem. 1. If the seller you bought the machine from is a business whose primary business dealing is related to 3D-printers, say a makerspace or reseller. Contact them and claim legal guarantee. 2. If the seller is a private entity or a business that does not usually deal in 3D printers or the like, say a company that manufactures boats. Contact the seller whose invoice I understand that you got, this appears to be MakerShop, and claim legal guarantee. 3. If the seller does not want to comply, claiming that they do not honor legal guarantee for second hand units or otherwise that the fault is not covered. Contact Ultimaker support directly and explain the situation and see if they are willing to help, either by putting pressure on the reseller or by fixing the problem themselves. 4. Contact the seller of the printer and ask if he or she would be willing to help out, for example by invoking the warranty himself as the original purchaser. Theoretically this would require you to sell the printer back and it could be a pretty odd situation to make work unless you are willing to fudge the edges a bit. You could also try and claim that you want to return the printer or demand a retrospective price reduction because the printer did not in actuality come with the warranty that the seller may have claimed. 5. Let's hope it doesn't come this far and you should ignore this step if you are sane. I'm only including it because it is the theoretical next step. Contact a lawyer and possibly file a small claims case in your nearest court. As a backup plan to this you can quite easily fix the printer yourself if you own a soldering iron and some suitable cleaning agent to make the adhesive stick properly. Since you are out of warranty anyway this won't be a big deal. The led strip costs about €4 for a 5m length and takes maybe 20 minutes to replace. Still, this is purely theoretical. I would be somewhat surprised if you are not able to come to a suitable compromise somewhere along the way since we are talking about a glitching led strip, almost obviously a warranty issue under any circumstance, and the unit is just a few months old. I would however wait for Sander or Ultimaker support to say what they think about it. Cheers

Have you contacted Ultimaker support? Because you quote Ultimaker and I quote Formlabs. Obviously Formlabs does not take this all that seriously in the scenario that you asked them about, so perhaps Ultimaker won't as well? I still claim that you may not even need warranty in this case. If the unit is less than a year old it will most likely, barring that I'm not well versed in french law, be under legal guarantee and you won't need to claim warranty against the seller at all. Perhaps @SandervG would be kind enough to clarify the official response to this particular question? Cheers

Np. I think that you will find that Formlabs does not agree on that point. "Formlabs warrants Formlabs-branded hardware products against defects in materials and workmanship under normal use for a period of one year from the date of retail purchase by the original end-user purchaser [...]"

My french is not nearly good enough to read that article but I would think that french law in this heavily standardised area is pretty much the same as in these parts. If that is the case I would think that you are mixing up warranty and legal guarantee. Warranty is extended by the manufacturer and can be hinged on several conditions, for example that you send in the piece of paper registering your warranty. Or that it only applies to the original owner. Legal guarantee however is mandatory and cannot be denied for this reason. It could be denied for a number of other reasons however, especially with a unit of this kind. Legal guarantee is first extended by the seller of the product, so you would have to contact the company that sold the unit, i.e. those whose invoice you have. This may of course be Ultimaker themselves I suppose. If that fails you could go one step beyond, which would probably be Ultimaker. On my UM2 I had the really, really bad led lights that were encased. They were less than useful. So I tore it out and replaced it with two pieces of 24V led strip I bought off Aliexpress for a pittance. I did not replace the strip on the top because it was incredibly hard to do (I did try) and also did not actually serve much purpose. So instead I put one strip on each side and wired them both from the bottom. If your problem is the led strip and not the control board, that would be one way out if you are so inclined. Based on the video I would think that the control board is not the culprit. It does look like it is just one or two leds on the top that are bad, the lower ones seem stable. Cheers

Excellent. Now that I am aware of it I won't be fooled again of course, but it was kind of irritating having to reslice six models and save again as I hadn't even reflected that the save button could do anything else than gcode. I almost exclusively save straight to SD card so I hadn't looked closely at the save dialog that opened in this case. :-) Sounds like a reasonable solution. Having a predefined primary mode and a drop down integrated into the button where you can quickly save as one of the other might be a good feature as well if there are users who regularly save in more than one format. Personally I will only use either gcode or save project for the foreseeable future. Cheers

Hi, Below is with Cura 2.4.0 on Mac OS Sierra. I had a really weird behaviour just now and I don't know if it is intended or a bug. I saved a project I was working on with File->Save project. I then went on to slice a few models I want to print as soon as the current print is finished. I changed the slicing settings for each model and pressed Save to File in the lower right corner, not thinking much about it. When I was done I noticed that all files I had saved was .3mf files. So I figured that the Save to File-button changed format with the latest used. If I manually change back to gcode it gives g-code and stays in gcode mode for subsequent saves so that seems confirmed. The file size doesn't match anything of the usual but it does match the file size generated when using File->Save selection and can also be imported just like any STL file. So I assume that the Save to file button changed from gcode to save selection with all models virtually selected (since no models need to be selected and all models are saved) when I saved a project. Is this a bug or intended behaviour? If it is intended behaviour could we perhaps change the button to reflect the current mode, just as when automatically saving to removable media, to make this extra clear? Cheers

Yes, that is the more hardcore version of the octopi. Although the ESP8266 can handle 5v on signal pins according to espressif so a level shift wouldn't be entirely necessary. But since they cost like $2 you might as well be on the safe side. There is a firmware already, but I haven't tried it. https://github.com/luc-github/ESP3D I'm still running my UM2 from SD but I have an octopi ready to go. Just need to get half an our to set it up and try it out. Like I said previously, I could live with some of the drawbacks of that solution if this theoretical speed problem is in fact not that major. That's a pretty hardcore solution. I did set up a small test yesterday to try out and ESP switching the SD card. Didn't do any switching, I concentrated on uploading files to SD. Did work but the performance wasn't that much better to be honest. On closer inspection it seems like the SD libraries for arduino in general aren't all that fast, at least at writing. I did find one thread where a 4mb/s write speed was claimed for a Due. Since that runs a 32bit ARM processor it should have no problem with handling a proper input method I suppose. But don't have one to try it. Will see if I can order one and give it a go. Cheers

Yes. Mechanical relays would probably work just fine as well. Don't think we need the speed and the number of switches over the lifetime would not exceed even a very cheap relay. Transistor based logic gate arrays would probably work too. But let's keep it simple and stick to a couple of basic solid state relays. Actually now that I think about it SSRs probably won't work. We need it to switch between two poles with a common output. SSRs don't usually, if ever, do that. I will probably have to stick with mechanical relays if I want to keep it simple. I am actually making a prototype based on an ESP8266 right now. We shall see how well it works out.

For starters there you loose the ability to use the excellent builtin menu system to adjust settings on the fly, right? The performance issues already listed may or may not be a problem in real life. Some have suggested it is but others, like you, seem to be running octopi without complaint. I think I could live with the potential shortcomings of such a method if there are no technical limitations. I am still on board for giving it a go again. I installed an octopi the other week but I have not gotten round to trying it out yet. It is not. I thought I was pretty specific when I said to use an array of SSRs to switch the electrical connections. To clarify. I am suggesting it might be possible to trick the Ultiboard into thinking that the sd card has been unplugged while at the same time making it available for writing by another device and then "plug" it back again. SD cards are after all a pretty simple electrical connection, you can solder pins to one and connect it straight to an arduino (though with 3.3v) if you wanted. Since sd cards are prone to oxidation or other glitchy behavior, especially at the moment of inserting and removing them, it would assume that the software is built to make some allowance for that sort of thing which would help in this scenario. So if we can avoid getting interference at the moment of switching the sd card and get the logic level correct it should be possible. Given that the pinout of the front board is obliging (I haven't checked yet). I am going to have a look at this asap and see if I can work out any major issues that will blow the plan up. Otherwise I am tempted to give it a try. Cheers