Tips for a new UM3

[Tiger91 1]

Hi guys,

According to my invoice, I should be receiving my new UM3 in a few days. I wanted to know if you had any tips for "breaking it in." I would like to test its abilities and if you know any torture tests that would be useful please tell me about them.

Also, what is your favorite place to get decent filament for the UM3 that's not from the website (kind of expensive). I used hatchbox but found it was likely to snag. Any good brands?

Thanks!

[SandervG 1,521]

Hi @Tiger91,

Congratulations on getting your Ultimaker 3, exciting!!

Do you already know what you will be using it for mostly?

PrintedSolid is a good source for materials and I am sure @gr5 and @lepaul might have some good suggestions too.

What would you like to test? Accuracy or dual color or dual extrusion?

If you go through youmagine.com and look for torture test or stress test you are bound to find some interesting models!

Good luck

[LePaul 331]

PrintedSolid is great, he's a small shop and I like to support a small business anytime I can.

[gr5 2,224]

Filament is something you don't want to go cheap on. Some of the better brands are Ultimaker, Colorfabb. Printed Solid has some cheaper brands that they have tested in Ultimaker printers. They claim they aren't as good but are good enough for things that don't have to look nice and don't have difficult tolerances.

[LePaul 331]

That's a great point.

Avoid the temptation of cheap filament (Luke, avoid the Dark Side!)

I'm a bit of a snob with filaments and have really only used ColorFabb and Ultimaker brand at this point. It costs a little more but when you are spending so many hours on long, detailed prints, why have it fail because of lousy filament? It's just not worth the hassle.

[thalassa 9]

Congrats on your UM3! We received our UM3+ a few weeks ago, and aside from a ton of trouble today, it's been performing well.

I've been printing this test piece at normal and fine quality in different UM filaments: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1363023 It's a great test.

Also very revealing was the overhang test: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1564848. So far, my UM3+ isn't performing very well at all on that one.

I'm not impressed so far with the PLA/PVA dual prints. The PVA doesn't stick well to the PLA, so some overhangs aren't any better than not using any support at all. Plus, the PVA drops bits everywhere, and sometimes they end up between layers of PLA, which creates imperfections in the print.

I started a thread on where to find filaments, and there is a lot of good advice in there about filaments themselves, too. Might be helpful for you: https://ultimaker.com/en/community/36101-best-us-distributor-for-um-filaments

Have fun!