In major need of help, no prints are successful.

[juanalvarado 0]

I am trying to get acquainted with the Ultimaker to the point where I feel comfortable enough to print for the E-nable program. So far, i have tried printing little keychains, adjusting settings here and there, but everytime there is an issue. Before, the feeder would just chew away at the PLA, but I solved that by loosening the tension. Now, the material just bunches up on the nozzle and I end up with this horrible mess of melted PLA. I am using reccomended settings, there is no dust on on the filament, I have calibrated and recalibrated the machine, I just cannot get a good print going. What is my next step? Completely take apart all of the components? Factory reset? What can I do to get a good print??

Here are screenshots of my settings.

http://imgur.com/a/9kzl3

Edited April 5, 2016 by Guest

[Labern 775]

Can you show a photo of the bunched up filament?

I would recommend first off to do an atomic pull to clean the Nozzle. ( Explained under support or in Ultimaker App. )

Some of the default settings do not give you the best results and these change depending on what Cura version you are using, So I would recommend that you create your own profile and tweak it till you get it just right.

Just to go over your current settings.

A layer height of 0.1 normally gives really good results and I thing is the best around layer height for nice prints. For layers small then this you can start to have issues with overhangs and blobs, so for starters stick to 0.1

You nozzle size is set to a larger size then actual. There has been some debates over this lately and in my recent tests I found setting it lower the actual is more beneficial. In your case changing this to 0.4 and making the shell a multiple of this would be good.

I normally use 3 shells as this gives good strength and also hides the infill lines.

Your infill is set to 100%, this is not required as you can print really strong parts at 20%.

The Top/bottom thickness should be your layer height times 6 - 8. So if your layer height is 0.1 and you want 8 layers thick then this should be set to 0.8 mm

The next thing is to check all the speeds under the advanced tab. I'm guessing these are all different. I would recommend you make them all the same and same as the print speed on the basic tab. In your version of Cura you can do this by setting them to 0.

If these speeds change during the print the flow through the nozzle will change but the heat stays the same. This means slow speed the filament can overheat and fast speed the filament doesn't get hot enough.

The only one you can leave is the travel speed. I normally set mine to 250mm/s on my UM2 and 300mm/s on my UM2go.