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dcschooley

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Posts posted by dcschooley

  1. Hi,

     

    Has there been any progress recently regarding a native Apple Silicon version of Cura? Reasons were given several years ago for not doing it, but I'm not sure those reasons are still valid.

     

    It would also be nice to have a Mac-standard menu bar.

     

    Thanks. 

  2. What is the most reliable way to get rid of the strings in at the attached photograph? This is a 27-hour print and I have three more to do. I am going to try an ooze shield for the next one. I am already using a prime tower. I'm using Alloy 910 with Matterhackers Ionic. (Yes, the image might be upside down. I don't know why.) I have reduced the standby temperature but it didn't seem to help. 

    IMG_4566.jpg

  3. On 2/15/2022 at 5:43 AM, viveksriram said:

    I Need help to connect the spool from back side of printer instead of loading in material  station.  Because the material I am trying to print is SSIC quite brittle while loading in material station. I have ultimaker s5 with material station at bottom. Refer image please 

    Some time ago I requested this as an option on the S5, such that you could load brittle filaments into one of the extruders while leaving the Material Station connected for the other. I didn't get a response.

  4. 6 hours ago, chrisw said:

    However if the CAD design for a widget gets dawn up in a way that expects this, then the part won't break very easily.  Solid PETG parts break, but if there are stress-absorbing structures, then the impact gets spread out and handled better. 🙂

    You are totally correct about designing to distribute the stress, but you can't always do that. Several years ago I was making interlocking cube-puzzles for coworkers. I was making them in either school colors or flag colors for those from overseas using high-quality PETG. Because of the way the pieces needed to lock together, there wasn't a lot of room to adjust the design, and at the time I trusted the material.  The parts didn't weigh very much, but they could still break if you dropped them. 

    • Like 1
  5. 12 minutes ago, JayWatt said:

    That PETG that I was previously using was not cracking along layer lines.  Those cracks were perpendicular to them. 

     

    PETG might be the most overrated material on the planet. It is much more brittle than it is given credit for being. PETG is nice because the prints look good, the temperature resistance is better than PLA, and it's easier to print than ABS. The parts also break when you drop them onto a hard floor. I've seen them break when dropped onto a hard floor covered in carpet. Most of what I do is not temperature sensitive enough to require PETG over PLA/Tough PLA, so I plan to use up my PETG on test parts and then only buy PLA, Tough PLA, or ABS when I need fancy colors. 

  6. 1 hour ago, alienrelics said:

     

    I've wondered if the carbon fiber really does much. The strength of carbon fiber is in the fibers crossing over each other, glued by the carrier. 

     

    I wish I knew the answer to this. A lot depends on how you define "strength." The carbon fiber definitely does something. My overall impression is that NylonX is stiffer and harder than unfilled nylon. It might also be less dense. NylonG (glass filled) is similar but not entirely the same. I don't know how much of this is due to the composition of the fill vs. the composition of the nylon. My formal training in materials science consists of a single undergraduate course decades ago. From what I do remember, adding particles will have some sort of impact because the polymer molecules in the nylon will have to rearrange themselves differently due to the presence of the little bits of carbon (or glass.) The problem with much of the testing you see on the internet is you don't know the composition of the nylon used in the composite. You can also make the argument that the mere presence of some sort of added particles might be more important than the composition, i.e., carbon fiber vs. glass. 

     

    From my experience, in terms of stiffness, which is just one measure of strength:

    NylonX/NylonG > Ultimaker Nylon/910 > Matterhackers PRO nylon > Taulman 645/Bridge

     

    Ultimaker Nylon and Taulman 910 appear to be very similar and are nearly as stiff as the composites, but that is based on my part designs. Someone else might get different results. 

     

    I like to print the same parts in different materials just to see how they do. I really need to do some more formal testing. 

  7. Matterhackers NylonX (carbon-fiber + nylon) s good stuff. You will need to use a brim, and I wouldn't recommend a flexible build plate for large parts. Small parts are ok. Remember that you will need a hardened nozzle to print CF- and fiberglass-reinforced materials. 

     

    Ultimaker clear nylon, followed by the black, makes the best looking nylon parts I've ever seen. 

  8. Definitely try nylon. Taulman Alloy 910 is great if you are good with basic black or natural/transparent. I like Matterhackers PRO nylon if you want color. The Matterhackers stuff is a bit more flexible, I think. I love nylon. It can take a while to get adhesion dialed in. Magigoo PA works well on glass. You might need a brim depending on which type of nylon you are using. 

  9. I have a problem with Ultimaker Nylon on my S5 w/Material Station where the printer complains about the material getting stuck in the nozzle at the end of the print. The prints are fine. The problem occurs during cool-down when the printer tries to retract the material from the nozzle. The nylon is definitely getting stuck because the gears grind out a chunk of filament. I think it is a temperature issue because when I go through the requested process, the nylon comes out of the nozzle just fine, even though I don't remove the Bowden tubes or anything; I just confirm I've done everything as asked even though I didn't actually do anything. I have had this happen a time or two in the past with other materials, but it is consistent with the nylon. I am going to increase the standby temperature just in case that helps. 

  10. Thank you. Your answer is what I was looking for. I had been indecisive about several materials, but I am going use UM's nylon. One thing I have noticed is that I'm more likely to run into situations where the hobbed gear chews out a bit of the filament and the filament quits moving. It's usually preceded by the material failing to unload from the hot end at the end of the print. This results in the next print not starting properly because the nylon doesn't extrude. The prints where the material fails to unload are fine. I think what is happening is that the nylon is getting slightly stuck in the hot end because it is cooling too much at the end of the print and this causes the hobbed gear to chew up the filament. I clear it up by following the steps on the display, but not really. I let the hot end heat up and then the nylon retracts just fine. I lie to the printer by not actually removing any of the tubing. This is on an S5 with a Material Station. Any ideas?

  11. Has anyone done any comparisons of the strength of Ultimaker nylon relative to some of the others? There are lots of comparisons of different nylons, but I haven't found one where somebody compared Ultimaker's nylon to the others. The composition Ultimaker nylon appears to be similar to ColorFabb PA Neat and Polymer PolyaMide coPA, both of which have reputations for being good materials. Alloy 910 and the Matterhackers composites are what I'm interested in comparing against. 

  12. Is anyone actively working on getting Cura to run natively on Apple Silicon (M1?) Most of the major libraries seem to be ready. I've been playing with the source code and while I haven't managed to get everything compiled, that's more due to my incompetence than anything. I think someone who better understands the Cura build process could probably do it. 

  13. Is there are recommended replacement interval for the Bowden tubes that connect the Material Station to the S5? The recommended interval for the printer itself is one year, and Ultimaker sells replacements, presumably of the correct length. Ultimaker doesn't sell replacements for the Material Station to Printer tubes. 

     

    I had some PLA that broke in multiple places. One of the pieces got stuck between the Material Station and the printer. I managed to get the filament out of the tube thanks to advice on the forum, but in the meantime I ordered a replacement tube, but that one will be too long for the Material Station. I'll use it for the S5 now that the Material Station is fixed, but that's what got me to thinking about a maintenance interval for the Material Station tubes.  

  14. Can anybody recommend a high-quality ABS with spools that fit in the Material Station. The Matterhackers PRO spools are a bit too wide. They fit if you sort of jam them in, but they don't turn freely. They sort of work while unspooling, but it's a mess when they need to roll the filament back up. I've had good luck with IC3D ABS over the years, but their spools are too big also. Ultimaker spools are guaranteed to fit of course. 

  15. 1. The ability to create our own profiles for the Material Station. I have some MatterHackers Pro nylon that prints great but hangs up when the material is pulled out of the print core at the end of the print. I think all that is wrong is that the core needs to be at a higher temperature. It would be nice to be able to fix this myself. 

     

    2. The ability to disable one of the one of the "inputs" from the Material Station and feed that core directly from a spool on back of the printer. So core #1 would get fed from the Material Station and core #2 would get fed from a roll on the back of the printer. This will be useful when a material is either incompatible with the Material Station, such as ColorFabb Woodfill or some cheap stuff that I'm using to test designs because it is cheap, or when the supplier uses a weird spool size that won't work in the Material Station; taulman3D, I'm talking about you. This will also be useful for filaments such as PVA, which mostly work in the Material Station but sometimes cause problems. 

     

    3. See #2, but better yet, Version 2 of the Material Station lets one of the rolls be outside of the box, but this might be asking too much. 

     

    Thanks.  

  16. When my S5 finishes doing a prime blob, the bed starts to rise before the print head gets out of the way. The prime blob gets squished against the bottom of the print head and dragged to some random, undesirable place. I'm using a prime blob because I'm also using a powder-coated PEI plate, and single layer skirts are a pain.

     

    It started doing this recently, but I don't remember when. My S5 is running firmware version 6.2.

     

    Someone else had this same problem with UM3 several years ago. 

    <UM3 knocking down prime blob before printing>

  17. "Improved UI for (non-NFC) materials
    We’re also really excited about the updates we’re making to the ‘Choose Material Type’ menus on your Ultimaker. Previously, you could only choose from material types. With firmware 6.1 you will be able to choose materials by brand, type and color; just like in Ultimaker Cura. This applies to Ultimaker materials, Marketplace materials and other third-party materials you may have created in Ultimaker Cura. "

     

    Thank You!

    • Like 2
  18. Which spare parts for the 3/S3/S5 printers do people typically keep on hand? I'm not talking about things like build plates or print cores, but things like fans and other little odds and ends that can fail. I have to replace the axial (hot end) fan on my S5, so of course the printer is down until the new fan shows up later this week. 

  19. I'm going to answer my own question about the NFC improvements and the Material Station. Prior to 5.8.2, getting the Material Station to read NFC codes was a real pain. It could take 8-10 tries to get it to work and it seldom worked the first time. I did a lot of loading and unloading with some filaments that were in the 8-10-try category this evening to test the improvements, and even added a filament the station hadn't seen before. Everything worked the first time. 

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 3
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