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Xen

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  1. Thanks gr5 and Brulti. The printer is currently being serviced, which is weird given that we had it for less than a week! I will try your suggestions when we get it back. Note that we also bought the advanced printing kit and always use the front cover when printing. I think the design I was trying to print is quite complicated. It has many little islands at each cross section and thus many retractions, as gr5 suggests. Viewing this in Cura is really challenging, because it freezes all the time in layer mode. That's not my PC's problem, as any other programs I use at the same time work fine while Cura is crashing. Any suggestions for other slicing software? Indeed, after a few days the print actually returned to its expected shape. I guess the water has dried out. I will now keep it in lukewarm water for a few hours, remove as much melted PVA as manually possible, leave it to dry, and then back in water. How can you keep nylon and PVA dry while printing? We tried PLA for our very first printing, which was the Ultibot design in the supplied USB stick. So, you would assume that it was sliced with proper settings by experts and would work fine. But, nothing came out of the nozzle! So we just skipped it and used nylon instead. I attached the stl file of a part of the design. This is for research purposes, hence the small part and why I removed some of the pictures in the first post! The small inner cylinders are ~10cm in height, but are all connected in the middle of the design for structural support. Thanks again. sample.stl
  2. Thanks gr5 for the reply. The model has internal horizontal structures, which I assume they need support. I can definitely try to print it without (once the hardware issues are fixed, that is). Do you think the Cura parameters are OK?
  3. Hi people, I was happy to buy an Ultimaker 3 Extended last week, with the 0.4 mm print heads. I also bought a 750 g spool of transparent Ultimaker Nylon. I use the latest Cura 3.2.1 (which is super slow on Windows 10, by the way), and also updated the printer's firmware. But since then I run into a number of issues. Firstly, I tried printing the Ultibot design that came with the provided USB stick (so, default parameters), using the supplied PLA and PVA. PVA was extruding well from the BB head, but PLA was not from the AA head. Then, I switched to nylon. This worked well with PVA. So, I decided to print a custom design of a cylinder that has an internal structure. I sliced a small part of this (40 mm height) in Cura with the default parameters for Nylon and PVA. I was surprised to see how bad the result was. While the outer wall printed well, the internal structure did not look right, with nylon and PVA mixed randomly. At the end, after having it submerged in water for a few days, the whole internal structure just melted away. As indicated by others, the print became bendy as well after being in water for days. Assuming the structure was too thin to be printed properly, I changed the design by thickening the internal walls to 0.8 mm, and changed several Cura parameters. Specifically, I reduced line widths to 0.35 mm and the print speed to 30 mm/s or less, I increased the infill density of Nylon to 100% and the support density to 15%. Everything else was just the default. According to some online posts, these are sufficient to improve the quality of the print, while not spending loads of PVA. So I went for the full design (156 mm height). After almost 3 days, this stopped close to the end (not sure when exactly) and the printer showed an error: "The X or Y axis is stuck or the limit switch is broken". So, I discovered that the X axis switch is broken and needs replacement. But let's forget about this for now... The print stopped ~1-2 mm before finalizing. The prime tower fall at probably the middle of the print, and the cylinder was obviously missing a lot of support on the sides. After melting the PVA in water for a few hours, a big chunk (4-5 cm) from the top was... not there! So for the last several hours it was only printing with PVA. There is still plenty of Nylon on the spool. Honestly, I am quickly losing my faith to the printer, or this technology in general. Does anybody have any suggestions to solve the printing quality issues, at least? What would be the best approach for Nylon and PVA? Maybe use a different material? Thanks.
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