Gabriele

Today I tried to print a medium sized object in ABS, build volume temperature set at 50° from cura 4.4. The internal build volume temperature measured was around 30 deg (build plate at 100°). The object warped and delaminated. With the air manager turned off the internal build volume temperature was higher, around 45°/50° and the print was perfect.

@kotsoym I Uninstalled the Air Manager and launched the same print again. No "hot plate" warning and the print adhered well.

@SandervG I have the same problem of @Roli4711. Tomorrow I launched a print I did lot's of time and it didn't worked. I had the warning "Surface is very hot" and the print didn't adhere anymore on the glass plate. Same settings as ever. Another problem I have is that when I abort the print the air manager didn't shut down. I have deactivated it for the moment, I hope Ultimaker will release a more reliable firmware and the option to control the Air manager power.

In my case nothing happen. This it what I get when i check on the menu after the installation IMG_5227.MOV.zip

I asked @SandervG in another thread if Ultimaker could at least share the connector pinout and power specification in order to use a custom controller and being able to use teh Air Manager we bought something like two months ago. Waiting for his reply, I 'll keep you posted!

@SandervG I bought and paid an Air Manager almost two months ago and I still can't use it beacause you are not providing a compatible firmware. Can you at least share the connector pinout and power requirements? I'm going to design and share a controller to allow my company and other people to use it. Best, G.

Hi, I just installed the Air Manager on my S5, looks like the firmware 5.2 doesn't support it yet. A few days ago I saw that 5.4 was available but now seems the latest stable is the 5.2. What happened to the 5.4?

Hi, this is the last print with triangle support pattern. As you can see the stringing is greatly reduced but still present and supports are much more reliable. Strings are quite easy to remove from the printed part, the problem is that after a string usually you have an under extrusion, for this particular model is not a problem given the size and the destination of use. Dimensional accuracy is pretty much the same as the last post. Overall speaking if you compare this with original images the improvements are significant. Having the filament baked for 6 hours at 80° and placed in the polybox with 10% humidity greatly improves layering smoothness. Overall the material is very rigid and for me at the moment is the only hard material with high softening temperature you can use for large print without any sign of warping or shrinking (didn't used yet the XSTRAND PP though). As a heavy Nylon user I noticed the filament is really sensitive to moisture but once printed the part is not afraid of water of humidity. I left one of those print submerged in water for 12 hours and the mechanical properties almost didn't changed. As a reference same print made with Ultimaker Nylon and Polymaker COPA with same water submersion time completely softened and the lateral wall were significanlty bent. Since I travel a lot for work I will start a stress test benchmarking this material with XSTRAND PP and some engineering Formlabs resins (Though and Durable) printing rotating trolley wheels supports I will use extensively, but I think it will be material for another post 😉. I attached the profile used for this print to this post in case anyone want to use it as a starting point waiting for a cura update. Thank you all for the comments and support. 0.2 XSTRAND PA (WIP rev5).curaprofile

I just managed to finish the first acceptable big print 🎉 Here are the results and some considerations, just for reference this is a 27 hour print, the object bounding box is around 150z; 180x; 150y. The profile I used is attached. Stringing Stringing is heavily reduced but still present especially on support when a long travel move is required. Strings that start from support are much longer respect that start from the printed object. Pay attention to the images, in some part what seems to be strings is support printed in air since some support towers broke during print. Support Two support towers broke completely. Since in the past print i never managed to have reliable support growing from inclined walls on print I edited the model to have some horizontal base for support. I will try next print with triangle pattern. Layering Overall layering seems good, there are problems on smaller details, like the wall next to holes, as you can see from the closeup that there is a sort of under-extrusion. In some part horizontal lines are visible. Gray colored gradients are visible along the Z axis Dimensional Accuracy (see the image to localise the part on the print) Side walls expected: 3.65mm printed: 4.15mm The open part near to the top expected: 20.2 printed: 19.59mm Side to side distance of the lock lever expected: 30mm printed: 30.4mm Distance from support base to lock lever expected: 20mm printed: 19.58mm Thickess of the top surface expected: 4mm printed: 4.2mm Hole diameter expected: 5.2mm printed: 5.0mm - 5.2mm slight ovalized Additional Consideration Although I had this filament at 80 deg for 4 hours and placed it immediately in the polybox where humidity is 16%-22% and where it stayed about 48 hours (print time included) I heard in some part during printing a noise like a "shshshshsh", could be moisture in the filament? I never heard the classic pop sound that usually wet filament produce. For the next print I will bake the spool at 80 deg for 6 hour and then start the print immediately. 0.2 XSTRAND PA (WIP rev5).curaprofile

"Almost prefect" was referred only at the printed part. I will post the detail when the print finish but at the moment the printed layers looks really clean if you don't consider the string (that you can easily eliminate). Maybe comparing the UMS5 with a MarkForged printer is a bit unfair, I think they have completely different prices 😉 I agree (as other forum users) that that Cura profiles are far from "plug and play" especially if you do engineering work, at least on my experiences with the UMS5 where I created custom profiles for every material I use. This is a perfect example, the nozzle temp provided in Cura is 20 deg over the printing temperature shared By Owens Corning in this post that is providing the best results at the moment.

I don't think the difficulties are related to the print core itself, I think the issues are caused by the material profile. I do a lot of research with materials as I use 3D printing for prototypes but also for functional parts. The CC core itself unlock interesting opportunities, from what I saw at the moment the XSTRAND PA is an incredible opportunity. The material when printed is really stiff and strong, it has very high softening temperature and zero shrinkage (a difficult combination to find). Despite the filament is very sensitive to moisture printed parts left 24 hours submerged in water are still rigid as they where before immersion (at the moment tested just on small print). To be honest I though that the material profiles where lot's more accurate, this material is dedicated to professional use where "working out of the box" mean avoiding tuning time related costs. Material cost is quite high, at the moment I almost used 3x 500g spool just for tuning purpose. I think the parameters provided by @AD_XSTRAND_OC gives huge improvements on the predefined Cura ones and are acceptable for low sized prints (if you consider a couple of things as you model, for instance avoid having support growing on inclined walls because it doesn't stick) as you can see on the images. The bigger print is still stringing and two support already broke as you can see in the image attached. In the first image what seems stringing on the left part of the print is actually a broken support resulting the printer printed in free air. The printed part though at the moment is almost perfect. Walls are consistent and clean both in corners and straight line, ripples and layering problems in small section are completely gone. @AD_XSTRAND_OC At the moment I think the zig/zag infill pattern with 0 Support Wall Line Count is too delicate the material is very stiff and head movement brake support tower when they start to grow vertically. The next print I will go again with the same settings (if you don't have other suggestion) but with triangle pattern that gave me more consistency with the support in past tests.

After about 6 hours of printing the UMS5 started to pause with a "empty filament error" each 5 minutes although the filament was in the feeder correctly and the spool was half full without any impediments. I disabled the filament sensor and after a couple of hours more the nozzle was completely clogged with the filament weared out completely by the feeder. I had to disasseble it completely to unclog it, totally I printed one and a half spool of XSTRAND with that CC nozzle. Now I cleaned everything with a cleaning filament, moved the Polybox closer to the machine shortening the bowden tubes (despite I never had problem with other filaments and the Polybox) and started the print again. Maybe the 12mm retraction distance is a bit too much and the feeder continuos movements wear out the filament? Maybe the temperature is a bit too low and the nozzle start to clog?

Hi @AD_XSTRAND_OC, thanks for the support. I tried the small scaled print with your parameters and the outcome is way better than the original one (first set of photos posted). There are still a small amount of strings especially in zones where the layer area before a travel movement is small. Another problem I still notice is the adherence between the support and the print. You can see it in the first image attached, the support did't stick the inclined printed wall. I will attempt now to print it full scale with a designed support base on the inclined wall an I'll share you the result tomorrow (about 25/30 hour printing time)

@SandervG @P3D The material has been dried at 80° for 4 hours as suggested and immediately placed in the polybox. Today I will try a new spool, I hope is just a material defect.

Hi @SandervG I'm having quite hard times printing the XSTRAND™-3D-GF30-PA6 with my Ultimaker S5. I made a detailed post that I'm updating with lot's of detail, what are your thought about it? Here you can find the full discussion, i will continue to update it with additional infos.