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I found out what happens to the PVA extruder. When you insert a new PVA, sometimes the extruder has a huge resistance. Then the gripper wheels slide over the filament, and everything comes to a halt. My solution is to release the gripper, and push the PVA manually until it starts extruding. At that point, I engage the gripper, and then everything works fine.

thanks for your help! Just in case, here is the Fusion360 model: https://a360.co/2IiEu6X

thank you so much for helping me! Can you elaborate? I have never used the mesh tool model checker, and I do not understand how this problem comes about and (more importantly) what can I do to remedy... 😞

here we go: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6zh07kzyrb8liw9/CuraHoles.3mf

I am dealing with a weird artifact. I am making a plate with evenly spaced holes. The outermost row of holes comes out nicely, but in all other holes the infill appears to extend within the holes. The original design is in Fusion360. What might be the issue here? I am attaching a screenshot from Cura from above.

400 µm isotropic clearance is perfect for ToughPLA on ToughPLA, where both the male and the female parts will shrink a bit. In the case depicted above, a metal male part pairs with a female ToughPLA scaffold. I am currently trying 300 µm isotropic, but for a flush fit I suspect that the minimal vertical clearance is going to be smaller than the horizontal one.

Is there a reliable way to calculate the minimal clearance of slots and plugs for UM5S prints, as a function of printhead, layer height and layer width? As an example, take the following pic, where a metal bar is inserted into a ToughPLA slot. I typically give 0.4mm clearance on all sides but I could go a bit lower. It also seems to me that vertical and horizontal miminal clearances differ. I know that I could find out all this by trial-and-error but maybe there is a mathematical option that would save me from reinventing the wheel...

Cura seems to automatically assign pre-defined colors to materials, and these colors are not necessarily easy to read - especially for color-blind people, who make up 4% of the Caucasian male population (it's an X-chromosomal trait) including yours truly. Is there a way to force Cura to use specific user-defined colors for each material in the sliced model? Thanks for any advice!

This may be a detail, but details are also important. The Fusion engine outputs files with very long names. Cura prints the file name on top of the duration info, resulting in garbled text. Text wrapping would be a simple way to prevent this.

Thanks but I do not fully understand. Did the bevels collapse because the thin parts melted? Also, what is the principle by which the neighboring tower would prevent this from happening?

Thanks rcfocus, you are right. I however tried to print it with a Formlabs 3 resin printer, and it came out flawlessly even at its lowest resolution (100 micron)! When it comes to small mechanical parts, I feat that SLA beats FDM hands-down (and it's competitive even on price, both equipment and consumables...).

I am trying to print this M4-M3 adapter: https://a360.co/2DiFZOO With my current parameters, Cura does not even bother to slice the upper part, presumably because the 0.6mm wall is too thin. Might somebody advise me if (1) such a part is printable at all with an AA0.4 print core, and (2) if so which wall thickness parameters would I need to input into Cura, or (2) whether it would be printable with a AA0.25 core? Thanks in advance!

You, sir, are a genius! The left short belt was totally loose, I mean so loose that it was a wonder that anything would work! After tightening the short belts, circles are now perfectly round! 🙂 This community is a blessing, seriously!!! 🙂

I checked the gantry using the alignment tools. The precision of the tools is limited, I do not believe that any deviation by <1mm would be detectable. Within this limitation, the bars are orthogonal. Also, there is no detectable head play. What I noticed instead, is that there may be a problem with the left hind stop. When pushed against the side block, the head bounces back a few millimeters. This does not happen with the other three side blocks. I suspect that this is caused by some kind of uneven tension of the belt. What do you think?

Thank you, very useful! In the meantime I have bought a whole box of Uhu sticks, the large ones (40g each). It takes <10 seconds to spread a layer of Uhu all over the plate. The results are satisfactory thus far. I tried the PVA raft method, and it is excruciatingly slow. It adds 1 hr to the printing and several hrs to the releasing with water. I do not recommend it.