Bossler

Let me add BioFila PowR. It's some sort of PLA-derivative but the maker claims it's good for up to 130°C... Do not know whether that's really realistic with this stuff, but at least I made a test in boiling water - and there was no sign of softening or weakness of this stuff! Gives quite descent surface quality as well. Unfortunately they have only a few colors available yet.

Reg. Polybox - what does your humidity-display tell ya? Mine always goes not lower than 20% with fresh descant in it... While the room is around 42-46$`% humidity...

Makes sense. I also suspect the coordination of movement and extrusion feed to be the root cause for this artefacts. Unfortunately. Because this means to me that there is nothing I can do against it - expect printing at ridiculous slow speeds. When comparing prints at various speeds (and yes, the speeds mentioned by me are "the headline numbers"), one can see that there is literally no difference from 100mm/s down to 40mm/s. Going down to 30 or 25mm/s is where the corners start to look like corners and not like a lory turning around a corner... Reflecting neotko's remark 30mm/s "headline number" print speed means 9 mm/s (!!) outer wall speed - which is somewhat like using a 3d-pen ...

Hi Sander, thanks, would be very interesting to learn whether one can finetune this aspect. I did not yet do a try with changed acceleration but will start a test for that right away.

These two way of influencing the z-gap are to address two different issues. Setting the z-gap during manual bed leveling should make the print bed as parallel to the gantry as possible while defining the default z-gap. Changing the z-gap from within cura is a way to finetune this setting. If the first one is not done precisely enough, the later will be of little value...

Wow, 40$? Here in Europe it starts around 10,-€ plus shipping... I have been told there are ordinary hairsprays that work well too. But after trying at least 5 different hairsprays without too well results, I tried this stuff and as said I am more concerned about prints sticking too well than anything else. But - for PLA you should really not need this stuff. If you did really do a good manual leveling and the print does not stick to the really clean glass plate, you may try a smooth layer of Elmers as well. You may want to lookup how to apply that smoothly. In a nutshell you smear one layer of it onto the glass plate, then a second one perpendicular to the first. Thin - it's not always more equals better;-) Then using a wet piece of cloth/a wet soft sponge, distribute the glue evenly so a very thin layer is left. Let it dry and print... This is cheaper than 3DLac (@40$...) but more work, I'd say.

Well, it might be possible to print at 200mm/s - as long as you do not have any edges, right? Anyway. I did the test: From bottom to top the speeds where (in mm/s): 100, 80, 70, 50, 30, 25 Looks like at 30mm/s it starts to become relatively okay. So this is definitely something the R3D N2 could handle better: This was printed at 70mm/s, No-Name PLA. (and the N2 I have owned did have a lot of issues, far from perfect) Shouldn't it be possible to take the direction change into account during slicing? So slowing down extrusion before slowing down head speed? I think I have been reading something about that issue with bowden type extruders and how to cope with that - but can't remember, where...

Certainly it is material dependent, yes. That's why I'd like to understand how to deal with it. On the R3D I did first calibrate the extruder-steps/mm (which requires to send Gcode-commands directly to the printer) and the corrected the flow afterwards for the different filaments. Regarding the sound - I can only say the R3D N2 was way less noisy. But it does have a full enclosure...

Thanks for the hints! gr5 - will try that "live" test. First one will be going down from 100mm/s, acceleration & jerk on standard settings - let's see. Btw. - I do normal print other things than cubes as well;-) Did not take the bowden-setup into account when thinking about this issue. My pervious printer was direct extruder type. There the solution was to print slower - while slow was around 50mm/s. As I thought that a bowden setup is way lighter than a direct extruder, I did expect it to be even faster...

Hope I'm not boring you guys but I do have another question;-) This 2-color-frog-print suffers from a lot of "lost filament"-pieces. It's not "stringing" since the filament pieces are solid and stuck to the print on one side only. The print was done with standard settings, temp. at 195°C, bed at 45°C, printspeed at 60mm/s. I wonder what's wrong here? Looks like I have to shave a frog now;-)

With the silver UM PLA that came with the printer I did have a +1% deviation on all axis, including Z. So 20mm turn out to be 20,2mm. Which does not seem to be much but can be quite annoying when two parts should fit together. With the before mentioned BioFila PowR I get quite decent fitting prints, just holes - especially with threads - remain a bit of a problem. Because I like to use printed threads it is not so easy to adjust the size of the holes. For things that need to fit together I always use tolerances when constructing things as one should do.

Thanks, Tom. Already noticed the timeout but did not know it's a new feature - I only know the current version of the FW;-) According to my experience, I would always recommend cleaning - at least with a hot pull - when switching to a) a lower temp filament or b) a softer filament So switching from PLA to ABS w.o. cleaning should not be a problem, vice versa it could be.

Hi All! I have an issue with the print quality of corners on my UM3e. They always become sort of rounded/overshoot as one can see in the pictures below. Now, I thought this must be due to the rather fast print speed I used. So I did print a test cube (2x2x2cm) at 70 mm/s and a second at 40 mm/s. 40mm/s 70mm/s To be honest - I do see rarely a difference as far as the "rounded corners" are concerned. In both cases the overshoot is about 0,25mm in height. Interestingly the overshoot is on both sides of the corners. The other dimensions of the test cube are fine, nearly 100% to the point (so 20mm=20mm in X- and Y-direction). So I would exclude overextrusion from the list of suspects... What can be the root cause? Mechanical problems of the printer? How is the "corner"-performance of your UM3's? Anybody with the same issue?

Would be great to understand the rationale behind this. Since my initial thought would be it makes more sense to be able to adjust the flow individually per extruder, not for both at the same time. Which would not help during a print already running, right?

Ah, understood, makes sense. Thanks for the info! Well, I have this printer just for one week as of today. I have cleaned both cores three times now. Must say that I did change filament types in between. So far I have used UM PLA, BioFila PLA, Taulmann Nylon and TPU95. Especially the TPU95 did not extrude well before I cleaned the print core. Guess it's one thing to have a printer running for 2000hrs on one type of filament but another to use different filaments for 2000hrs.

Hi Sander, thanks for the info. My UM3e uses the latest stable firmware as of Jan-31-2018. (can't check the number now since it's printing;-) I can't remember the exact value right now but I have noted that at the start the printer "pre-heats" both print cores to some temperature which is below the final print temperature (sort of standby-temp.?). This seems to be regardless of the actual print settings (e.g. using just one nozzle) and yes, it seems to be a function of the firmware, not from the gcode (that just heats the left nozzle in the gcode, as it should).

Z-Gap is the distance between the nozzle tip and the build plate. You set that during manual bed leveling, not within Cura. I recently did a 1,5hrs print with Nylon. The roll of Nylon was inside a closed box, humidity inside the box 20%. And after just 1,5hrs the Nylon started to make sounds of humidity ("brizzle") while extruding already... But PLA should not be that sensible as Nylon so I guess humidity might not be the problem here.. Normally, using the fan at 100% is a good idea with PLA. What you could try: - if available, apply a very thin layer of 3DLac (w. the build plate outside of the printer, please;-) (PLA really sticks as Hell on that stuff, just one layer of it is enough!) - manually level the bed precisely again (after 3DLac has dried) - print at the lowest temp. +5°C as stated by the PLA-manufacturer (e.g. if it says 185-225°C, try 190°C) - use no raft, just brim or even just skirt (you'd be surprised how shiny the underside of your print can be) - may lower the print bed temp.; try 45°C for instance (I even print PLA on 3DLac with the bed temp set to 0°C...) If you use raft with the Z-Gap set to 0, you'll be having a hard time (at least) to get the raft off your print. But you are right, the higher the gap the less adhesion there is.

I did print it already, but used BioFila PowR together with BVOH. Printed like a dream! PowR is a relatively new stuff from "TwoBears". They state it some PLA-derivate that is stable up to 130°C... Guess that even beats PC and CPE+, right? I am not sure if the PowR-Material really is that good but I did put the printed part into boiling water for ~5 minutes it it came out undamaged and still hard. Plus the surface quality of prints with tha material is quite good. I do have the advanced printing kit so I even have the "door" (for my taste, the build quality of the "door" is a bit on the cheap side but it does the trick). But at current I do have other things lined up to be printed so did not yet test ABS with the UM3e. Within the R3D I used two different brands of ABS. Both went fine so far regarding warping - if you get the Z-gap set well, ABS sticks really good to the buildtak-surface I used with the R3D. In fact I have one glas plate for the UM3e already coated with buildtak for ABS;-) But I'll first try it with my new "best-print-bed-sticking"-friend 3DLac... Currently my biggest issue is the dimensional accuracy of the prints. Holes too small, prints too big... Is the common method to cope with that adjusting flow in Cura or what other ways do you use here?

Thanks, Sander! All good so far, hope for you too. I left it there and as said, the issue was due to the PrintCores clogged with filament, not due to any problem with the feeder. The recording is an m4a-file. The noise was similar to the z-axis making adjustments (active leveling) but way louder. As said earlier, it has already been getting way less noisy. Agreed. Just finished three prints without cleaning "in a row";-) Yes, it's a spray and for sure I do spray the build plate outside the printer. (but thanks for the warning anyway;-) And again - I am really impressed how that stuff makes the prints stick to the build plate. Actually I am thinking how I can lessen the sticking effect a bit since it's already a bit too much;-) Will certainly investigate into the beta again. Within the referenced slicer you can set a certain height (layer) and then specify nearly any parameter and set it's value. So you can change layer height, build-plate or nozzle temp and much more depending on the layer height. Quite versatile and useful.

Thanks for your tips! Good idea to try a print on a cold build plate. Since I use 3DLac the prints do stick all too well to the plate anyway, so I guess at least for PLA there's no need to heat the build plate. This 3DLac-stuff makes the prints stick so well I already broke a printed part while trying to get it off the build plate... Btw., have been using IdeaMaker as slicer before "converting" to Ultimaker. Within IdeaMaker one can change settings based on print height, which is a great feature. Am I right that there is no such feature in Cura?

Well, my experience varies a bit here. First time loading did not work, I had to clean the print cores first, then it worked. The clogging was also the reason for the grinding of the filament. As said somewhere else/before: The printer was very noisy during first prints and became much less noisy in the meantime. No idea what changed/did wear in. What I meant was some guidance where to set the feeder tension to (low/mid/high; for which material which setting etc.). It was set to the middle which in general always is a good idea to start, I guess. But as said above - the issue was not so much the feeder tension but more the clogged print heads. See above;-) Yes, in general it prints quite well. What I need to figure out is how to improve the quality of overhangs. As stated somewhere else, I hope it is possible to get better undersides of prints than at this benchy: ...also notice the "zebra-effect" - already seen that this might be an issue with the stepper drivers but I feel a bit skeptical regarding the proposed solutions ...

I do not know whether this stuff is available where you live but I did recently discover "3DLac" to be really extraordinary stuff to stick things to the buildplate. In fact I did already have several occasions where the major challenge was to get the prints off the build plate! And when things stick that well to the build plate, there's no chance for warping at all. I am printing without raft, even no brim, on glass plate with a very thin (one layer of 3DLac-spray) - and that works for PLA as well as for ABS and even Nylon (other issues with nylon like humidity, but that's a different story). In general about prints coming of the build plate - a basic thing is bed leveling & the z-gap! Really make sure you did a decent job at manual leveling of you print bed! 0,1mm "off" makes a huge difference... Btw.: from your pictures it looks like your print temp. is too high or/and your filament has drawn humidity.

So now I do have the UM3 5 days over here. And the frightening thing is - it got way less noisy! Why frightening? Because this tells me something has been "worn in". And worn in parts always wear out somewhen... So let's put it that way - it is working fine now but I am concerned about how long it will do so... I really do not have a clue what was causing the noise - but I do watch the UM3 closely to find out whether there are any loose parts. What I've seen: the left rear (short) belt was scratching on one of the wires of the Y-endswitch. This is not very professional, guys from Ultimaker. You may want to consider a slight change in the way you mount this endswitch resp. the cable... a groove in the housing could help, for instance... As far a the printing performance is concerned so far, this printer is a mixed bag. It can produce quite nice prints, yes. The dimensional accuracy is something I need to work on - seems it's overextruding. Even with original Ultimaker-Material - which I would not expect. After all that's what I paid for - a tested combination of material & machine, right? What also is a bit annoying is the frequent need for cleaning the hot ends. I am not used to have to clean the nozzles after nearly every print. That makes this machine a good choice for hobby-printers - but it's advertised as production-type-machine, isn't it? My suggestions would be to revise the filament unload-procedure. As I did write in another thread, I have had very good results with pre-heating, pre-loading, and then unloading type of operation. I've tested that on the UM3 by using the "move" command before unloading and can assure you that this works way better. As you guys seem to like to automate everything for users convenience I'd suggest to implement this kind of procedure as automatic sequence: Unload Filament = Pre-Heat Printcore; Extrude until <acknowledged by user>; Unload. For loading filaments it would be good to have the option to load a "manual"-material where the user could choose the load temp by the wheel. Could default to 200°C as a good point to start. Would save some time when you prefer to work without the NFC-feature and with "strange materials" like PTEG ...(as I do). So far for now.

Hm, no idea whatsoever anybody? I really do not like the lower layers;-)

After being some days into the usage of the UM3 now, I would like to say: - the documentation plus the menu guidance on the UM3-screen should be updated for manual bed leveling - listening to the printing, especially at the lower layers, is advisable - if you hear lots of corrections by active leveling, just do a manual leveling right and your all set