jirodriguez72

So I ran into this myself - if you copy or duplicate an exiting UM profile: In Cura you will use that profile to slice your project, but keep in mind the base generic material you created the profile from. Then on the machine select that generic material as the type of filament you have loaded. I will look at the material type field from the copied profile (say GFF Nylon) and then provided you selected GFF Nylon on the machine it will then accept the gcode with the specific settings you put in for that print job. Now if you want a specific unique material to select on the machines menu then you can instead select "create new" in Cura, but this means you have to set everything about that material profile that you want it to have. It is literally a blank slate for the most part, but when it saves the UMM file it has a tag of "custom material" and it has a new GUID number attached to it. When you load that onto a thumb drive the machine will see it as a new material and load it. A third in-between option is to start by duplicating an existing material like you did in the first method, but after you get done go to the Material Preference pane in Cura and unlink the duplicated material from the base generic material you started from. This will create a new GUID# for that material so when you sync materials with the machine it will see it as a "new" material. A shorter version of all that is duplicated materials are linked to the parent material and use the same GUID # as the parent material. So the machine does not see them as a "new" material - just as a group of specific settings to use on that type of generic material for printing. But materials either unlinked or using the "create new" option generate a new GUID # and are recognized by the printer as their own unique material type. It is this group that will sync to the printer as a "new" material, the previous group will print but the printer still views them the same as the generic material they were created from.

The setting that is causing this issue is part of the printer firmware, meaning it can not be accessed or changed by the user. No matter what you set your profile to if you watch the temp on the hot end after a print it will cool it down to almost 100C before trying to pull the filament. This might work for non-composite materials okay but for the composite materials that print much hotter they get stuck in the hot end about 90% of the time. Seeing that we paid thousands of dollars for the material station it seems like at the very least we should have the option to adjust that setting to ensure that it's working for us. It's kind of like buying a sports car and finding out you can't drive faster than 50 mph.

I have the exact same issue with material unloading and it is really annoying. I would 100% agree with CTotten that it destroys the value of the material station for our company. We have prints that run for 5 or 6 days and we are usually using CF Nylon ($85/500g) or GF Nylon ($65/500g), and Aquasys120 ($100/500g). One print will run through 2+ spools of the CF Nylon and about 3/4 of a spool of Aquasys120. We try to take advantage of weekends and overnight times to let the printer run, but if the filament gets stuck trying to unload because it cooled down to much on a Friday evening we loose the entire weekend of run time. Or even worse is we lose the run time and then the wizard has issues and we lose the print which can be upwards of $200 worth of filament. I get that you guys want to dummy proof this system but you should give users the option to adjust that temperature to ensure the filament unloads properly every time. We specifically bought the material station to be able to run multi-day prints with little to no user input and this "feature" makes it useless for that purpose.

I run into this all the time now on our S5 Pro bundle (it didn't used to happen). What usually occurs is a print finishes (or a spool change needs to happen mid print), but rather than heating up the print head and then unloading the material the printer tries to unload the material when it is at about 100°C. Obviously it can't do this which causes it to error and then wait until somebody comes along to run the material failed to unload wizard. And yes we have gone in and made sure the standby temperatures on the materials is high enough to allow the material to unload. But the printer seems to ignore it and still uses a much lower standby temp.

No problem.... FYI this is a NylonX piece using Aquasys-120 dissolvable support material for ref. Other than dissolving the supports the only cleanup we have to do is a little bit of light scraping with a razor blade across the surfaces to remove a few stray blobs. This is a pump impeller that is 10" on the OD and we spin these to 3600 RPM under load in water.

Water soluble supports (PVA) are going to give you the best surface finish, because you can set the gap to "0" and the print is fully support. We print NylonX and CFF-PC a lot, but have to use Aquasys-120 because PVA won't stick to PC, and I will say it ain't cheap! $100 for a 1/2 kg roll!

When running materials that print hotter (PC, CF-Nylon, etc.) I find that I have to turn down the flow rate and/or temperature a bit. You have a pool of melted material in the print head that is under pressure from the filament feeding into into it. So if your temp is too high you can end up over-extruding quite a bit and then dragging the print head through the still soft/molten plastic (especially on smaller parts). Over time that will build up and can grab the entire part and break it loose from the print bed, leading to "flooding" of the print head - which is what it looks like was starting to happen to your print head. Since the feeder gears are so far away from the print head a retraction does not instantaneously relieve the pressure on that pool of liquid plastic so you have to fine tune the temp. and flow to allow for good layer adhesion, but not end up with over-extrusion. Best of luck!

I have this same issue with NylonX and NylonG using the .6 CC Ruby core, used to not have any issues, but about 5 or 6 firmware updates ago it started having this issue and I have not been able to get it to go away....very annoying considering the cost of S5 Pro bundle.

I would go with poly carbonate or if you need the part to have a little bit of flex (so they don't crack) CFF-Nylon. Both would hold up to the harsh environment inside of the dishwasher and still provide good mechanical properties.

I do know one recommendation was to put the spools in the cardboard box they come in (at least for the Ultimaker ones) and then place that in the chamber and ramp up the temp to dry it. I imagine any smallish box would work? I personally like using a food dehydrator that fits several spools of filament and has a fan for forced air circulation.

Most prints will break loose with just a little bit of pressure IF you wait for your print bed to cool down completely. The slight difference in thermal expansion between the glass and the plastics is usually enough to break the "death grip" that sometimes develops. But if not then yup a tub of water is your best friend for getting PVA to let go of the print bed 🙂

I dry filament in my print chamber all the time - I place a couple of threaded inserts (or other small 1-2 cm bits of metal) on the heat bed to create a small air gap between the plastic filament spool and the glass. Then run the heat bed up to the temp you want to dry your filament at, close the doors on the chamber and leave it alone for 4-6 hours (or longer for nylon). This does a decent job of drying out spools of filament. FYI - this is assuming you have a fully enclosed chamber.

One request would be for a high temp version of the silicone nozzle covers that can withstand temps upwards of 300 °C. I primarily print in carbon filled nylon and carbon filled polycarbonate, and many of my prints run between 4-6 days of continuous printing - so at the end of one print run my silicon nozzle cover looks like this. The burnt side was from a 6 day print with NylonX at 265° on the hot end, the other side was my support material (Aquasys120) at 240°. I basically have to replace the cover after every print because it gets so crispy that it starts dropping bits of burnt silicon onto the print. I am guessing anybody else running consistently much above 250° is going to have the same issue - I for one would be willing to pay more for a cover that lasted longer at high temps vs. one that I have to constantly replace and constantly is dropping bits of burnt silicone onto the prints.

Also keep in mind Cura likes to put down 120% flow (or something like that) for the first layer to make it "stick" buy smooshing it into the bed more. I personally find this leads to a messy first layer, I usually drop it back down to 100%, sometimes even less depending on the material and the temperatures. For instance when I print carbon filled nylon I usually end up with a flow rate of about 94%, this gives me good adhesion, minimal blobs/zits, and nice surface quality on the skin layers. But each material will be different so you may have to play with it a bit.

In the spirit of Halloween, a skull candy dish.... and it gave me an excuse to print something using this OVV3D Tri-Color filament! 😁 I actually printed this at home on my Prusa I3MK3 (upgraded to S+). The spool I got had a weird color shift apparently, I have seen much taller prints than this that don't have that sudden color shift... but it still turned out nice and looks cool. I find this filament prints really cleanly at 110 on the hot end and 60 on the bed.