glx

I guess he doesn’t want the regular walls on the top layers, but I don’t know why there could be an issue with them. You can get rid of the extra wall around the top infill (the option is called „Extra skin wall count) but not the walls, or you can switch to concentric infill, then everything looks the same.

They have also the 17-4 stainless steel filament. As far as I know these filaments adopt techniques and processes that are commonly used in metal injection moulding and aluminium can’t be (easily) injection moulded due to oxidation and temperature issues. So I guess there are no aluminium-filaments out there. I’m no expert in that area, I was just curious about the same thing some time ago because I thought it could probably be easier to process because of its significantly lower melting point, but there seem to be other problems that can’t be easily solved.

How many top layers did you use? That effect is called pillowing, it comes from the layers on top of the infill not nicely bridging over the infill gaps. You can usually get rid of it by just adding more top layers and/or increasing the infill. Alternatively you can lower the printing temperature, slow down the print speed for the top layers and/or increase the amount of cooling.

Have you checked the small cable in the back of the printhead (looking from the front in the middle behind the cores, a red and white wire that connects to a PCB on the hatch). That can break, I had this recently and it did the same, I then discovered that the white wire broke off, the auto leveling worked sometimes, I guess when the wire had by chance some contact. It's kind of difficult to spot if you don't know it can happen.

Mine somehow looks a little different, but the spring is supposed to push the lifting switch down when the core is deployed. As far as I remember the spring isn't that strong (since the core itself is pressed down by its own spring), you should be able to push it back in place with some tweezers. If that doesn't work, you probably have to disassemble the printhead and get it back in place.

I just noticed recently that there is an issue when printing objects that reach closely to the maximum z-height of my UM3. The thing I printed is 198mm tall. While printing everything is fine, the problem occurs when the print is finalised. The printhead moves slightly to the side, then the printer homes the z-axis that causes the build plate to raise a bit before lowering it. Since there is no extra margin the printed object crashes into the printhead. I had this happening three times recently (I don’t print that tall things often and I think it was the first time I printed something that reaches the z-limit). I honestly didn’t know what’s going on until I accidentally stood next to the printer yesterday when it happened. The times before I just heard a noise from a distance, yesterday I was like "wtf, that was that noise??". Apparently there are some more people with the problem (I asked in a Facebook-group to figure out if I probably did something wrong). The first time was a quite sturdy thing that I think even managed to damage the bed levelling sensor (at least since that time the active levelling fails at a 50% rate with triggering sometimes before the bed moves, before it was very reliable). I just "staged" a video with the thing and hitting the "lower build plate" option on the printer. I’m using the latest firmware, Cura 4.8 and the stock glass build plate. Is there a simple fix (besides not printing such large things) that I can perform maybe in the end-g-code by myself or can this probably be fixed in some later firmware? Maybe someone can check if that can also happen with other Ultimaker printers so it probably can be fixed :).

Im basically using the default settings with an UM3 on arachne alpha. There are strange things happening, when the infill is at a narrow area there are inserted mini travel moves (e.g. these blue dots in the circled area) that cause the printer to nearly stop moving (I'd say it's below 1mm/s in these areas). Regular infill works, it only happens when the infill area is quite small. An option for the "order inner walls by inset" that affects only the first layer would be good. I had some issues on the first layers with an object with many holes, the printhead combed across everything and pulled some of the printed single lines away by doing so. Overall I like the strategy the slicer uses, it's especially useful for small objects the have areas where walls are not a multiple of the line width. I made some replacement caps for some connectors that came out perfect with a 0.25mm nozzle, though they have walls that are only 0.4mm wide.

Ich benutze für PLA meistens PETG als Breakaway-Support und andersrum. Bei einfachen Formen und glatten Flächen klappt das super mit 0mm Abstand.

Ich drucke auch ab und zu CF-Filament mit einer 0.4mm Düse. Wichtig ist, dass man die line-width auf mehr als die 0.4mm stellt (ich hab sie meistens auf 0.5mm), sonst verstopft die Düse bei mir sehr schnell. Ich hab so das Gefühl, wenn man zu wenig einstellt, kommt nur das Basismaterial raus und das Carbon-infill bleibt größtenteils in der Düse hängen, was sie irgendwann verstopft. Unter 0.15mm Layerhöhe würde ich auch nicht empfehlen, das begünstigt das verstopfen auch. Ich drucke auf einem UM3 mit einem Core den ich mit einer microswiss-Düse ausgerüstet habe. Den Feeder habe ich so gelassen, ich drucke echt wenig mit CF. Mit meinem UM2+ habe ich ca. zwei Rollen XT-CF gedruckt und man hat keine Abnutzung an den Feedern erkennen können.

Oh sorry for the late reply, sure, I uploaded them to Thingiverse. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4283065

I designed and printed some large (x5 scale) flowers that are inspired by the lego ones. I also designed some additional bricks to build some kind of flowerpot (but I'm not yet happy with it 🤔).

Have you contacted a local reseller? I did read somewhere here that they can provide packagings.

I went completely away from ABS since I discovered the PC-filaments Ultimaker PC as well as the Polymaker PC-Max. At first I was kind of afraid of PC-filaments because its mostly called so difficult to print. I print them both with the default settings on my UM2+ (260°C/110°C) but use (other than recommended) just gluestick and a brim as bed-adhesion on the glassplate what works fine. Don't try it directly on glass, I ruined a glassplate in the beginning when the PC cracked out pieces of the glass while cooling down. For small parts with steep overhangs or bridging I set the cooling fans to 12% (under that my fans don't start reliably). I have my UM2+ fully enclosed, without that I got some issues with warping and it's important to let the parts cool down slowly.

I changed the flow rate within the tune-menu after started printing. I was basically just playing around with some settings, I have some nylon that seems to have no layer adhesion at all, so I tried some things to work against that.

Hi, I just noticed that there seems to be a problem when selecting a different flow rate while printing (e.g. 150%). After the print finished and I change the material right after that print, the material seems to be unloaded with the same modifier. That wouldn't be that much an issue but it also loads the next material with that modifier so it crashes into the nozzle at the high loading-speed and the feeder grinds the filament away. I'm using the original firmware version 3.3.0.

Hm that looks really not that nice for the low speed it is printed 🤔. Are maybe the acceleration-settings a bit high? My 2+ does similar prints (see my blue Benchy) with the factory set quite high settings.

I just printed small stuff until now, but I use 0.2mm layers, a 0.4mm Olsson Ruby nozzle on my Ultimaker 2+. Temperatures are 260°C nozzle and 65°C buildplate printing rather slow with 30mm/s and low cooling fan settings. Some gluestick works fine for adhesion. Some °C more on the nozzle would be good I think, but the 2+ doesn't allow more than 260°C. Overall these settings work fine for me.

Hi, I've seen you like Benchys, so I just printed two 😄. Since I only do this for hobby-use I sadly can't afford (or justify 😅) an S5. The blue one was the first ever thing I printed on my Ultimaker 2+ with no clue of the printer and what PLA-filament that was, just used the suggested and factory-reset values. That's kind of old already. The grey one is from my old i3 Mega, also printed with PLA from which I don't have a clue what brand or exact temperature-range it is, also just used the default settings suggested by Cura. The white one is also printed on my Ultimaker 2+ but with adjusted acceleration-settings on the printer and an, over the time I use the material, slightly tweaked print-profile. This is not printed in PLA, it's Polycarbonate. All of them are printed with 0.15mm layerheight and were sliced with Cura 4.4.1 (the blue one obviously with an older version, since it's kind of two years old now). The only cleanup is the removed brim from the polycarbonate one, the rest is as it came of the printer. The white one sadly contains some discolored material that collected up at the nozzle. So here are some pictures: (there follows some text below the photos 😄) I cannot really compare the results since those are the only three Benchys I ever printed. To be honest, the first thing I thought after printing the very first (blue) Benchy was the same as OP's: "Why the hell can't this ~2000€ machine print a proper Benchy?!". But then I thought a bit further, I bought the Ultimaker not to print cheap-ass PLA, that could also be done with my i3 Mega, I bought it to print more advanced materials that can't be printed at all on that machine. So after learning what the Ultimaker can do, playing around with the settings and using different materials over the time I got some better understanding of what I'm doing and what can be changed to get some aspects better. So after knowing the tools it can also produce a nice (I think it's nice) Benchy. I think you can't expect buying a 6000€ printer will automatically get you perfect prints, it's like buying a expensive Mercedes-AMG, go to a random racetrack and expect the new world-record for that track. You have to know the car, you have to know the track and how they play together, you even might have to consider the weather and stuff. So in my opinion to get good results you need a solid, reliable printer (that has it's price, if that has to be an S5 will stay an open question that everyone has to answer on it's own I think). In my experience it's quite more important to know the materials you use and how they behave in certain conditions. What's also quite important is the design of the printed parts, I think you shouldn't blame the printer, that it can't print something that was intentionally designed not to be printed well (without adjustments) 🤷‍♂️. Oh that became quite a long post (my first ever here in the forum 😄) and maybe a bit offtopic, so long story short, in my opinion an expensive printer doesn't make perfect prints on it's own, you have to tell him how to do it properly. I also like to print CaliCats over Benchys to test stuff: