Fan shroud full of plastic

[nullroute 0]

I started a print before bed, first couple layers looked fine, then I woke up in the middle of the night and saw the print head pushing around the whole print, cancelled it, went back to sleep.

Here's what I was greeted with in the morning:

The blob wouldn't budge, so I had the great idea to heat up the print heads to loosen it. I heated them up by 20 degrees until I could pull the plastic off (200 degrees finally).

Then I had the great idea to open the fan shroud. It was stuck on from the plastic flood, I finally got it open a little and a little molten plastic came out and immediately hardened so I couldn't re-close it. Note the tiny piece of blue blocking the closure.

So now I'm stuck.... should I take the whole thing apart? (Are there diagrams somewhere?) Should I heat up the heads more until the plastic is more molten and magically flows out? Should I cut off the white rubbery thing underneath and pull the plastic out from that direction? (How's this rubbery thing supposed to look, anyway?)

More background:

Left head: AA with UM Ultimate Blue PLA 0.15 layer, 15% infill, 210C extrusion, 64C bed, 70 mm/s

Right head: BB with UM PVA 0.15 layer, 20% infill, 215C, 40 mm/s.

A previous print with the same settings but with lower support interface density, the supports didn't stick to the bed and ended up sliding around, but the PLA stuck fine and the print turned out pretty well. The prints before, the PLA didn't stick with 200C/60C or 210C/60C, so I raised the bed temp a little. Not using anything on the bed, just wiping it with a microfiber dust cloth and a little alcohol between prints.

The blue is currently all over the place surrounding both nozzles. There didn't seem to be any PVA anywhere but in a glob stuck to the right head's tip. (The print was mostly PLA with a very small amount of support.)

Edited December 13, 2016 by Guest

[SandervG 1,521]

Hi Nullroute,

Thank you for your post. Sorry to hear you had some difficulties with your Ultimaker 3. Do you know if this happened because your print got detached from the build plate?

The silicone cover should normally protect your printhead internals. It looks like it is broken, can you confirm? Did this happen during cleaning, or was this already the case before you started a print.

About how to move forward, I would recommend to get in touch with your reseller. They should also have received instructions on how to help you get 3D printing again.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask!

[nullroute 0]

The silicone cover looked like that I think since I got the printer a month ago. (If not, it happened during the first print.)

I'm pretty sure it was because the print detached, but maybe it detached because it somehow got stuck to the nozzle? It's done the pushing the print around the plate thing a couple times, usually I've caught it pretty quickly. I thought I was fine to print overnight because I already ran two prints of the same model and it was ok. (Well, one had some warping, but no sliding around the build plate.)

I'll get in touch with my reseller, thanks.

[nullroute 0]

Here are a couple pictures from the bottom with better lighting. The silicone when I got it looked basically like that (part of the edge tucked in, part of it out), but since the print heads also weren't symmetrical I figured that's how it was supposed to look.

And speaking of how things are supposed to look, are there detailed pictures or diagrams of how everything is supposed to fit together? When I received the printer, one of the tabs for the plastic cover over the motors on the right was popped out of its slot and I didn't notice until my first print, when one of the arms holding up the build plate made a horrible grinding noise from scraping against the slightly out of place plastic cover.

[nullroute 0]

Upon further inspection, I found issues similar to the ones in this thread:

https://ultimaker.com/en/community/33658-um3-good-quality-but-poor-quality-control

Cracks:

This one is also finely cracked, with the crack going along the rod, but I couldn't get an angle that made the crack show up. (The smudge along the plastic around the motor is what I mentioned earlier, and there's also a crack in the case you can see at the bottom of the picture.)

More clear on the grinding damage and other crack:

On the other side, a scratch where the plastic covering pops in:

And the LED wire rubbing on the belt (you can see a bit of black rubbed off on it already):

[gr5 2,224]

Your reseller can fix all of these issues.

But you wouldn't have them in the first place if the part stuck to the glass. You should have parts stick to the glass so well that you can pick up a tiny part and it lifts the entire printer off the table and you can swing the printer around by a small ultirobot stuck to the glass.

I know this video is quite long but I edited it down severely. There's just lots to know to get parts to ALWAYS stick to the glass. And on a UM3 you additionally typically have to bend up the back two aluminum corners to get your glass more flat or your wipe tower won't stick well either.

 

[nullroute 0]

Thanks for the video, getting the part to stick right is definitely one of my biggest problems. And then sometimes when I think I have the best settings for a material figured out, the next time I use it, something will go wandering just to spite me... (I've done some prints of multiple nuts/bolts, and sometimes *just one* will start roaming around. And of course not the same one every time, so it's not a clear sign that one area has maybe a different temperature....)

How would I find where the first layer starts and ends in the gcode? So the line I'd add is "M221 s200" (and later "M221 s100") if I wanted to increase the squish?

What about when the brim sticks fine, but the part still warps? Like, if you look at it from the bottom, sometimes it's like a V where the edge of the model starts. This happens on sometimes on prints that stick so well I have to use a razor to pry them off the bed. But so far my experiments have just been with a clean heated bed, no glue or tape added, I'm sure glue would help the sticking factor.

[gr5 2,224]

You have an ultimaker! You don't need to mess with gcodes. Just turn the 3 screws counter clockwise a half turn as in the video.

But if you re-run the z-offset you will get messed up so don't rerun that unless you first run the bed calibration again. The bed calibration and the z-offset need to be calibrated in the exact same manner to get the nozzles at the same height.

Am I clear? Turning the 3 screws equal amounts is safe as long as you don't *then* do the z-offset calibration. Never mess with those screws in between the 2 calibrations.

The layers in gcode are all commented nicely. Search for "Z" in the code. It occurs once per layer.

[nullroute 0]

Yeah, but I'm way less intimidated by software than hardware. And I'd have to move my fancy cardboard box cover more...