Ultimaker:Too hard for general users to achive high quality?

[Daid 306]

ddurant, indeed, support for SF works, but if you have small "organic shaped" objects, then the support is a lot harder to remove without breaking the object. And you'll also get a lot more strings between the support structure and the object then.

[Daid 306]

Print with support (only the body of the fox)

After cleanup:

I printed it in transparent PLA. Took about one and a half hour, at a pretty high speed. As you can see it's not perfect out of the machine, some "strings" as we call them are visible. I cut those with a knife (really easy) removing the support was a bit more of a problem. And you can see the bottom of the print is a rough because of it. But removing the support ended up to be easier then I had expected.

It's about 5cm in length. And used about 2m of filament, which is less then a euro of material costs.

[polyoptics 0]

Wow Daid that's so cool! I am surprised at the quality too! It seems like it might be smoother than it looks, due to the transparency and being able to see into the surface a little at the crosshatch lines?

A few questions:

- what is the layer size or resolution of the print?

- how long did the clean up process take?

- what are the chances of the radar part coming out ok, with all the tiny details?

- I wonder how much easier the clean up would be and supports to remove, at double the size?

- I looks like the support structures printer actually quite well, was it hard to setup?

Also, if you printed one at 11cm, measured diagonally from front left foot the back right foot, as nice as you can, I would gladly pay you double the material cost and double the shipping cost (or what ever you want really) to send it to me in New York, so I can take a look!!

That's so awesome man! Thanks for running a test through!!!

[Daid 306]

It's printed at 0.1mm layers, with makes the layers almost invisble (but not 100% invisible) I found it a good tradeoff between printing speed and quality.

Took about 30 minutes to remove it from the print platform (kinda stuck down really hard) and basic cleanup. The transparent PLA indeed makes it a bit hard to see how good the final quality is.

I only had 2 hours to print it, so I picked a size that worked, and didn't switch color from my machine.

If I rotate it so that the details on the radar are on the top, then the support won't cause too much problems I hope. But at this scale some of the details could cause problem. But we'll know after I've prepared those parts. The body was easy to "fix" for printing. I just copied the model, removed all the radar parts, and used the boolean operator to add the eyes into the sockets. Then there where some duplicate faces in the tip of the tail the I fixed, but I don't think those would have caused any printing problems. But the radar parts are smaller parts with a lot more detail. Those will be a bit harder to cleanup.

The support would be easier to remove if you scale up the model. I think I can also reduce the material amount used for support for a weaker support structure, as the support was pretty strong.

Enabling support was just changing 1 setting from "no support" to "exterior only". So that was easy.

One printed at about double the size would use 8x the amount of material, but would also use 8x the time to print. I've never done a 12 hour print. I'm also reduced to the colors black and red then. As I don't have a lot of my other colors (I could order some more, so no huge problem). I'm in Europe, so I think shipping costs to the US are something like 30 euro for something this size (I've never shipped something ;-) so I'm not sure)

But I'll need too think about it. Especially running my machine for 12 hours without me around I find a bit worrying. People have done it, but they don't have a cat that likes to crawl into it.

First I'll try the other parts

[ddurant 0]

Print with support (only the body of the fox)

The support under his chin looks very dense - lower Raft\Interface Infill Density to make it less dense..

[Daid 306]

The support under his chin looks very dense - lower Raft\Interface Infill Density to make it less dense..

I have, set it to 70% for the print I just did. But it's still quite dense. So I'm going to try 50% next. It still was quite easy to break off, because you can just jam a screwdriver between the different lines to break the support up.

It's my 3th print with support, so I still need to experiment a bit what works best.

[polyoptics 0]

Awesome Daid, thanks for the information! Don't worry about the larger one, its probably not worth the trouble of the shipping and everything -- its easy to get over excited about 3d printing for me. Looks really really nice, Im super interested in the support structure still, so def post up some images if you end up testing this some more.

AWESOME!!!

[Daid 306]

I printed the top of the radar yesterday, as 2 parts. One tiny part for the column, and 1 top part.

I removed some of the smaller details, as they are unprintable at this scale. Which are the parts around the base of the radar, and the top part of the large radar.

I also think the arms attached on the radar dishes are not printable at this scale, they also are made up out of a lot of different 3D parts, which is great for animation/modeling, but bad for 3D printing I'll have to boolean them together, but a few parts contain faces that are the wrong way around (boolean operator hates that, it also hates duplicate and open faces) So it's going to be some work to fix them.

I might just scale up the arms a bit so they are printable. I'll have to see what works. I'm also out of glue, so I could not glue the parts together yet.

[Daid 306]

I haven't got around to print the radar dishes yet (had other stuff to print/do)

But I did do another print with support, 50% material this time around. And this made the support strong enough to support higher layers, but weak enough to make it easy to remove. I found it so good, that I've made it the default setting for Cura.

[somerwil 0]

Hi,

since I own an Ultimaker and feel my print are pretty nice I'd like to share my thougths.

I bought an Ultimaker in October 2011 and decided to put it together in one of the ProtoSpace workshops. Building the machine is not hard but you'll have to be patient. It's not more complex than building an Ikea piece of furniture but difference is it takes somewhat longer. I managed to put it together in approx. 12 hours. That's up to the point where you plug in the power supply and start installing software.

After only one day I already noticed Skeinforge is a nice, customizable program but also slow, very slow. Siert Wijnia gave a presentation about Netfabb on the third day of the workshop and I basically decided to buy it right away! This software still has its flaws and bugs (even newer version 4.9) but it's awesome and great to use! Calculation speed is great and because of that it can calculate more layers for you within a nice period of time. The quality of the prints was way better than what I managed to get out of Skeinforge with less effort.

My conclusion would be:

1) Is the Ultimaker for everybody? No, not really. My mother for example won't be able to build one. You will need patience on the build if you're not experienced.

2) Is the free software for everybody? No. It's pretty hard to understand.

3) Is Netfabb any good? YES! Netfabb changed a lot for me in terms of print quality. Paul Candler's print profiles do the trick. Worth every $!

4) Will my prints be first time right? Well... it depends on what you call 'right'. See comments.

5) Is 3D printing on Ultimaker a Click 'n Go? No, you'll need to be interested in the technical bits of 3D printing to get the most of the machine. Know what you're doing/ changing/ analyzing prints is important. I think that's also part of the hobby but it probably not everyone's cup of tea ;-)

Ad 4) Forget about printing Netfabb's Ultra quality for the first prints. Start with Skeinforge settings. You'll need to adjust the print bed (not difficult but takes some time and experience) to get the first layer right. I found a sweet spot in the bed levelling in november and didn't change it since! Back to quality: My first Ultra print came out 14 november, one month from completing my printer.

Today I feel the Standard Netfabb quality suits my needs best. It's a good combination of nice looking prints an print time (for me!).

PS: I'm a mechanical engineer but not particularly a 100% technician.

Hope this was helpful,

Michael

[ian 32]

can you share with us some of your creations Michael

Thanks and best wishes.

Ian

[destroyer2012 0]

There are many slicers out there just as easy to use as netfabb but free. For example, Cura, slic3r, KISSlicer. There are only a few things that you need to do to get any of these three to work well:

1) Measure your filament with calipers to get a diameter to three decimal places. EG, 2.705 mm.

2) Measure your extruder steps/mm with calipers. I do it by drawing a line on the filament a known below the extruder, then extruding, then measuring the distance to the line again. Do this a few times to get an average steps/mm.

3) Level your print bed. I do this with a 1 inch travel indicator. Before I got the indicator I did it by lowering the nozzle down to zero and screwing the bed up until the reflection of the nozzle meets with the real thing. That worked OK but the indicator works much better.

3) Come up with a good start.gcode/stop.gcode. This means working out your the z height of your nozzle exactly when its at the home position. Cura and KISSlicer already have pretty good start/end.gcodes, just edit them to your liking.

This is all assuming your extruder doesn't slip or jam. And in my opinion it covers the issue of "quality". If the problem is jamming, what we are talking about is assembly issues or design problems. However, if it does jam, there are several things you can do:

1) Adjust the tension knob to press the filament into the hobbed bolt harder. But not too hard!

2) Increase the temperature of extrusion.

If you have the plug problem, then more drastic steps may need to be taken, such as re-engineering the bowden clamp as discussed in many threads on these forums. But in my opinion the plug forming is just a symptom of the bowden tube developing grooves from the compression fitting, which is normal. After the plug forms just take the hot end apart, remove the plug, then tighten the aluminum plate up higher without taking the bowden tube out of the fitting. This is made easier by deviating from the assembly instructions a bit and making the bowden tube stick out a centimeter longer than they instruct, so there is a gap between the aluminum plate and the wooden head. Thus, when it does slip the first time you have space to adjust it up. It shouldn't slip again after the grooves are created.

Thus, I think it's not hard for general users to achieve high quality assuming they don't run into the plug problem, which has been a buzz killer for many people. However, if you do run into that problem, there is help, and it has definitely been resolved.

One must keep in mind that $2000 is actually a very small amount to pay for the type of quality people typically expect from 3d printers. Not to mention, UM is a kit, so if you don't expect to be mucking about and re-engineering stuff or figuring stuff out yourself, stay away.

[somerwil 0]

Hi Ian,

Sorry for late reply but pictures of my prnts can be found on Thingiverse, username somerwil and/or Maak Mijn Idee.

[polyoptics 0]

Thanks all for the replies and all the great information. I did decide in the end that although the Ultimaker is an amazing printer, it's not for me. Extra thanks to Daid for the amazing help. Sorry for my late reply, but I though I should update the thread.

I based my decision on:

- my lack of engineering knowledge for making repairs, which will be needed from time to time.

- the current state of support structures and the configuration of open source software parameters in general.

I think something like the cube is a better fit for me, in terms of user friendliness. However the resolution is not fine enough. Also, although it has an excellent snap off support system, what is really needed is a dissolvable support material.

I will continue to wait (impatiently) for the 3d printer that best matches my needs to be developed.