Printing Sideways

[dazzan 0]

Had my ultimaker going perfectly , it now prints , the almost leans to the left ( the print as it builds ) , Are the the pullys slipping , how would i tighten them as ive tightend all the screws .

The print was supposed to be a barrel , it built a smaller piece no probs , now anything larger seems to have this problem

Any Idea how to fix please .

Im using

Cura , but had no problems , until it started to drift .

regards

darran

[owen 19]

Hi

You could check if your pulleys are slipping by holding the shaft and seeing if you can turn the pulley.

You could swap your Stepper Driver boards to see if the problem carries to the other axis.

Check if a belt is very loose or motor mount.

Can you move the head by hand easily?

Is one of the blocks hitting something like a belt tensioner?

[dazzan 0]

cheers for the reply .

when I pull on the pullys as hard as I can , they dont slip . So I guess thats ok .

Ill do the stepper driver last , just in case .

Yes my belts are loose , but i dont see any way to tighten them & they have always been loose , even when printing fine ?

How to tighten up my belts ?

Print head does move by hand , but is not loose .

I cant see any blocks hitting anything , i dont have a belt tensioner , can I use a clip of some sort ?

Ive looked again and the rods seem pretty dry .I might put some grease on them again im not doing it regularly .

Ill test print something else and have another look .

Ultimaker are @ tct live , they might have one for me to look at , or I can bring my one up to show .

Cant hurt , at least they can point out what might b going on ?

Thanks

[robmiles 1]

It might be the belt from the motor to the upper shafts. I had mine come loose and it went wrong in exactly the same way.

The motor bolts can work loose and the motor can slide up, causing this smaller belt to slip. I pulled my motors down and gave them a good tightening and they have been fine since.

[danluc 0]

Mine does the same thing. Its an issue resolved by printing at 70mm/s or slower. The design is a bit patchy in wood and you will get grey hairs trying to align your axis perfectly. Also i noticed that the axis themselves move inside the bearing since the caps are not flush with the bearing and axis.

[greenarrow 0]

Mine used to slip like this quite often. Then I switched from using grease to sewing machine oil on the rods and it has never happended since.

[danluc 0]

I will have to try this out. It happened again today on an iphone stand. Thanks for the idea.

[kevlar 0]

I have the same problem, only my printer goes off course in all directions. I checked all the pulleys and timing belts and all are okay. Any suggestions? Dazzan, how did you fix your problem?

[yzorg 9]

if not mechanics related it could be EMI interference

-> one or more endstop cables (or aditional fan power cables in my case) are passing too near to a steppermotor cable.

avoid this and have all wires properly twisted.

try going faster. In Cura If i slow down my my gcode to be generated for 50mm/s i get all strange printing behaviour.

I can print fine with 70mm/s...

[danluc 0]

I still didn't try the different oil to replace the grease that I added. I'll have a look at the wires and twist all pairs while keeping them away from each other.

Right now for large objects as well as speeds over 50mm/s forget about it. I had prints do this even at 50mm/s and anything above right away it happens.

In all honesty I'm liking the Replicator 2 and its ready to go/industrial look to it. MB looks set up to be more more like a product.

[ian 32]

clean off your rods and buy a small bottle of sowing machine oil for 2 euros.

it really helped me.

Ian

[arch1tect 0]

Same problem of a machine that goes of coarse in all directions.

 

this is a link of the video I took of what is happening.

[danluc 0]

I had the same issue. I didn't ended up trying the sowing machine oil to be honest. It is a mechanical issue for sure and not stepper motor crosswie interference. I just cut the timing belt for the axis it was slipping in tensioned it with zip ties. 2 loops at each end secured with zip ties and another zip tie to bring them together. I already had a tensioner installed inside the wooden block but I guess the belts stretched even more. Problem was solved right away.

[billdempsey 0]

I solved this problem by tightening the pulleys on the motor drive shafts really tight. The pulleys couldn't be moved by hand, but tightening them further cured the problem, so they must have been slipping a little.

 

[gr5 2,265]

leans to the left

 

SOLVED! I had this problem. Printed almost perfectly but tilted. Took me hours of staring at the ultimaker as it printed to figure it out. It was the new motor mounts for x drive. They are black plastic tubes and are a recent upgrade to the ultimaker to keep it more quiet. The problem is the x drive belt is rubbing against the wooden back of the ultimaker making the belts twist slightly and the x motor lose a step occasionally. Fix was to add one washer under each of the 4 plastic stand offs on the x motor mount. Took less than 5 minutes to fix. I could not beleive that was the problem but it was.

 

[leadingedge 0]

Very much a case of me too! Just spent a whole day printing sloped models and wondering what was wrong. I've slackened and retightened all of the gears. Re-aligned the axis. After re-mounting the x-motor for the second time, I held the drive shaft whilst moving the head and bingo .... the upper gear on the short x-belt was loose - damn sure I'd tightened that several times.

Anyway, this whistle http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:77183 still works even though it's a little crooked

 

[leadingedge 0]

Very much a case of me too! Just spent a whole day printing sloped models and wondering what was wrong. I've slackened and retightened all of the gears. Re-aligned the axis. After re-mounting the x-motor for the second time, I held the drive shaft whilst moving the head and bingo .... the upper gear on the short x-belt was loose - damn sure I'd tightened that several times.

Anyway, this whistle http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:77183 still works even though it's a little crooked

 

[leadingedge 0]

"the upper gear on the short x-belt was loose - damn sure I'd tightened that several times" . ... And I had. Even after tightening, the gear slipped agaon and prints went wonky within the first few layers.

I've now added thread lock and a test print has come out OK - here's hoping.

 

[variador 0]

Arch1Tech

Your print didn't slowly go off or lean after a few layers.

It looks to have gone way off in one second.

Just finished getting past a similar looking problem with a firmware reload. The trick for me was to really get a reload. Still trying to figure out that one.

Have you tried printing something else? In my case every piece would suddenly go off track by more than a centimeter right away. Very similar to the way your movie plays.

Hope you find your problem