Messed up prints... ideas?

[Sforsyth 0]

Okay, so first off, hi all!

I'm Seán, and my first admission is that I've only ever done SLA prints on a Form1, and this is my first foray into FDM printing. I got my Ultimaker 2+ today (yipee!), and did my first print, which came out excellently, exactly the same in fact as the sample that was shipped with the printer. Then I went to print my own objects. Having never used Cura before, I brought my STL files in (I know they're printable as I had previously uploaded them to Shapeways), and tried two options. The first was without supports, and the second with a raft. Both failed miserably. (See image)

Should I be adding a raft to this type of print? Or no supports? Certainly when I added the raft it was glued very firmly to the surface (really struggled to remove it afterwards in fact), and the quality of the raft itself was beautiful (small consolation). Does anyone have any ideas what I'm doing wrong? The plastic at one stage was just curling up on the nozzle itself and not even being laid down, but I suspect this was down to it catching previous layers on itself as it went back and forth as there were strings everywhere.

Sorry for the total noob question, I'm sure this is an easy fix, I'm just literally 5 minutes into things with my Ultimaker and failing miserably on my own here. Hopefully once I get up to speed I can be a more active member of the community here.

Any help appreciated!

Cheers,

Seán

[gr5 2,267]

The leveling procedure has made you level the bed too far from the nozzle. Just turn the 3 knobs counter clockwise (as seen from below) a half turn and try again. Your part isn't sticking to the glass because the filament isn't squished enough. You want like the blue print below.

[peggyb 171]

the thing that went wrong in your case was the second layer after the raft, which in this case might be replaced by a brim instead (rafts are not used very often). The problems are the round beams with a rim around, the rim touching the build plate and the beams floating. Did you check the layers view to see if there was any material underneath the beams?

What also helps in these first layers is to go slower until the base is there, then go to normal speed.

[Sforsyth 0]

Hi all, and thanks for getting back to me. It actually turned out to be the version of Cura! I reverted to the old version of it (15.04.6) and haven't had a failed print since then. The new version just consistently gave me failed prints every time (2.1.2). Simply changing to the old seemed to fix it. I didn't modify anything else whatsoever, and now they're all fine.

Thanks for the input though! Much appreciated.

Seán