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Hi sorry mate, I just sold it yesterday.

I'm selling my Ultimaker 3 to make room for a bigger machine. It has been very reliable with exceptional print quality. The last photo is of an engine grille that I printed on this machine, to attest to the quality of its output (more about that project here). As can be seen from the pictures it didn't have a hard life. It was lubricated at all times and kept in a clean environment. It has no issues that I'm aware of except I could never get any of my Ultimakers to work properly on the wifi, including this one. It's most likely my wifi and not the printers. This UM3 comes with 2 x AA 0.4 print core (one is unused) and 1 x BB 0.4 as well as front enclosure. I recently replaced the Y-axis linear bearing. The glass bed has also been replaced recently. Also included is some used and new filament, the details of which should be clear from the photos. Given its good condition I want £2000 for it but will consider reasonable offers. Local pickup preferred (Chelmsford area, Essex, UK).

I tried the advice of @steve1423 and changed active levelling to "always" and performed a levelling procedure. It still pushed the nozzle into the glass afterwards on both machines, so clearly not a good result. HOWEVER with the setting on "always" the auto-levelling procedure (before the print starts) miraculously works. Which is probably what @steve1423 meant. It's almost as if the algorithm for on-demand active-levelling is broken but the "always" one (before a print) works. I still need to do further tests but after this change all my prints have a perfect first layer on both my UM3s. I'll do some printcore swaps and see if it still works, in which case I may actually get some use out of my machines again. @CarloK

@CarloK I have uploaded the log file. Before the active leveling the z-offset was perfect (manual leveling) but now after the active leveling the nozzle is pushing into the glass. Thanks for your help in advance, this is a huge issue to me.

Smithy, I checked the distance between the base plate & heated bed is 14mm on both machines. I'm sure many other UM3s run fine, I'm not sure why mine never really recovered after the firmware update. I checked again, both are on the latest version. The glass plates are original and in good condition and clean. I initially though about speaking to the distributor but when I saw on this forum that so many people had the same problem after the firmware upgrade I decided to wait for a fix, which quickly came and solved some of the issues but in my case not all of them. Keep in mind before that my printers were a joy to use. But by the time the fix came I had lost so much print time that I decided to invest in other less finicky machines. In the background I'm waiting for UM to release firmware that fixes my problem since it clearly started with a firmware upgrade which sadly is not reversible. If not then I'll simply use them on the same basis as my ultra cheap Dremel for simple 0.4mm jobs and more demanding requirements go to my other printers where I'm focusing my time and money now. It worked well but this weekend I made the mistake of changing the printcores on my one UM3 and as always I can get printcore 1 dialled in nicely but somehow I struggle with printcore 2. Hence my frustration. Just as that fatal firmware upgrade rendered some UM3s completely useless, others were somewhat affected and others not at all, so I believe that their fix also had varying effects. Don't ask my how that is possible but it seems to be the case. I do appreciate your interest though.

The printers perform the auto-leveling procedure but when I try to print directly afterwards, the nozzles are right on top of the print bed preventing material from coming out. If I press slightly on the print bed while they try to print you can see the backed up material squirting out. It's not as bad as it was with the previous firmware where it pressed the nozzle so deep into the glass I thought it was going to break it (well documented problem on this forum) but that improved with the latest version which is also a few months old. I checked, there's no new update. So in summary, the printers both perform the auto leveling procedure but somehow both end up with the wrong result rendering the feature useless so I have to do it manually. If I only had one UM3 then maybe I can accept it's a hardware issue. But both my printers developed the issue the moment I upgraded my firmware a few months ago (see my posts at the time) and both got a bit better after the last update and I was hoping that a new update will completely correct the problem. Incidentally my one printer has a new auto leveling sensor and PC board so that's certainly not the issue.

Probably the best feature of my two UM3 printers is auto bed leveling which enables me to swap print cores in and out and for that reason I have bought quite a collection of print cores over the last year or two. It worked like a charm and I was about to get another few UM3s but thank goodness I didn't. After that disastrous firmware upgrade a few months ago. I am now reduced to manual auto bed leveling which I manage OK with print core 1 but just never get quite right with print core 2 and by the way the process is designed for a double jointed contortionist. And why should I do it anyway? I paid extra for a so-called premium brand with printers that do this automatically but these days after auto bed levelling my nozzles just scrape the absolute hell out of my build plate and I have to do it manually. I am on the latest firmware. When will another upgrade come which will make my UM3 printers usable again?

@SandervG @kfsone I didn't read the whole thread, just saw the posts about firmware update and bed levelling and want to comment on that. I hope what I say is applicable. I have 2 x UM3 machines and they were on old firmware. I constantly swap print cores in and out and do auto levelling every time after such a swap and it works very well. A few days ago I updated both to 5.2. In both cases it first had to do an intermediate firmware update before it could get 5.2, I guess that's how old the firmware was. Immediately I had bed levelling issues on both. Both machines literally want to print .6mm deep into the glass. I know this because after the 3rd .2mm later it's still scraping the glass, only after the 4th later does it print above the glass by which time the nozzle is clogged. I replaced the printcores to see if it helps with the bed levelling but it made no difference. I now have to do manual levelling and I'm not sure if I've lost my touch but even that is a struggle now. If the print head as much as touches the levelling card then it scrapes the glass when printing. I now actually need to see some daylight between the nozzle and the glass, when doing a manual levelling, before it prints the first layer at the desirable height. I guess I can do a factory reset and see if the problem goes away but first want to hear what others are experiencing.

@kmanstudios sorry I didn't mean to be snippy and appreciate your interest. It's only the support in pic 1 and 2 that hangs in mid air. The support in pic 3 prints fine. @ahoeben sounds like the bug you refer to is causing this problem. If Ultimaker are working on a fix then I'll wait for it.

My overhang is at 55 degrees and as I said the horizontal expansion has no effect on this, apart of course from making it thicker/narrower along with the rest of the support. These supports appear on what looks like a 10 degree overhang or even less. As for the support not touching, it is not a just graphical representation, it does not touch the part in real life also. As I said in my original post, the fact that it tries to print the support in mid air creates lots of loose extrusions all over my part.

Why would Cura generate support where clearly it isn't needed? In the first two pictures it's a bit hard to see but support starts against an almost vertical wall (the side of a large hole) where it's not necessary at all, in fact it can't even be printed there because it never touches the part so I have all these loose extrusions sitting all over my part as it tries to print it in mid air. In the third picture it's quite evident that a tall support beam is generated for no reason at all. Again it's not even touching the part and only takes time & material to print. Support horizontal expansion only makes these support structures a bit wider/narrower but doesn't take them away. Is there anything I can do to remove these unnecessary supports (other than manually)?

As I was saying... That's how I started my day this morning.

I have by the way uninstalled and reinstalled Cura multiple times in the past but something I do (and by the sound of it something only I do) creates havoc inside Cura. I use configurations pretty extensively since I print with a wide range of materials and print cores. There are still some bugs in the way Cura saves and restores configurations, and I know to work around them, but I have no way of working around this issue. When this happens it's game over every time.

The problem is not backup (I'm making backups manually in any event). The problem is that I constantly get configuration errors and to make things worse, backup seems to also backup the problem, so if I reset Cura and lose everything, and then restore my last backup, the configuration error is also restored.

This is getting a bit tiring now. I see this screen at least once a month, sometimes twice. Always when I have the least amount of time available to re-do EVERYTHING in cura. I always use the latest Cura, as I'm doing now. Always the latest stable firmware. New laptop, everything updated and working perfectly. Except Cura which has been giving me endless issues as has been reported on this forum at length, always relating to configurations and settings that go haywire. I've recently installed the Cura backup extension in the hope that, if this problem can't be fixed, at least I can work around it. But no, after restoring my latest backup I'm greeted by this window immediately. So the backup has backed up the bug and restored the bug. @Ultimaker guys, please help. I'm getting beyond desperate now. I'm increasingly using Simplify3d not because I want to, because I don't have time to check, repair, nurse, troubleshoot and re-adjust my Cura settings all the time. I appreciate the constant addition of nice features in Cura but can you please pull up the handbrake for a while and sort out this very fundamental problem.