Closed TOP surfaces

[cloakfiend 995]

I dont have the olssen block. But it seems like the spring is not tight enough. Is that possible? The spring lost its spring? So i need to changethe springs as well? Interesting, i wonder what else will crop up. When will i need a new nozzle? Whats the average life roughly if estimated to be used everyday all day with PLA.

Edited August 10, 2015 by Guest

[gr5 2,170]

PLA won't wear out your nozzle - you should be able to use it without changing the nozzle due to wear "forever". But if you use brassfill, stone fill, carbon fill, or other abrasive fills the nozzle might only last a few hours of printing before the tip gets ground down and twice the size which destroys quality. But PLA is fine. Did you try my "flow" suggestion?

[cloakfiend 995]

Not yet im not printing flat letters yet, but will do one for a test. So basically i will do everything as before, but just increase the flow to 110 and it should fill the top layer in prints done at 0.2mm layer height. Have i got that right?

[mja 1]

 

@gr5 okay, i will try to print at 110% flow and will report back. I always had the impression that increasing the flow is just covering up a problem instead of fixing it.

[cloakfiend 995]

All long as it works ill do it. If your nozzle is blocked (i.e. its doing that clicking thing), then increasing flow is a bad idea, if its not then it should be ok in my opinion as you are not trying to fix an actual hardware jam with software. If there is no actual jam then im guessing your arent adding to any problem other than an issue with the print rather than the printhead itself... not sure but thats what i think. besides i never touched flow before so i will give it a shot and see what happens.

[gr5 2,170]

Ultimaker shipped me one of the first ever UM2 Extendeds to try out.  Unfortunately I had to return it.  I had this problem with that printer - no matter what I did it had gaps between the two shell paths and infill wasn't touching very well - little gaps.  Top layer looked bad also.  Bottom layer was fine but only because I moved the bed closer to the nozzle.

I went crazy trying to fix this - I printed a solid cube adjusting things in the tune menu on the fly.  I tried higher and higher temps up to 240C.  No change.  I tried printing slower and slower down to 10mm/sec.  no change.  I checked the steps/mm setting - it was fine.  I checked filament diameter - fine.  Played with feeder spring tension.  Eventually I just gave up and increased the flow to 110%.  it worked great - I only wasted 6 hours on this but it was a non-stop experimenting and somewhat frustrating 6 hours.  I did many prints on that machine including all the parts for my quadcopter and all of the test pieces for my quadcopter.  It worked great as long as I was at 110%.

I never figured it out but it didn't matter - once I modified flow it worked great.

Edited August 10, 2015 by Guest

[cloakfiend 995]

Good to know! luckily i have great layers on all but 0.2 layer height, but ill give it a shot when im due for one of those. im staying at 0.06 for the mo and have no issues with anything at that layer height so everything is gravy.