Using 1.75mm filament with UM5

[amitmonash 2]

Funny I did an oopsy, just bought a locally made shiny new 1.75mm filament in excitement and it came very quickly in post as well. As I was about to put the filament in my wonderful and highly engineered 3d printer S5 bundle pro material station, I realized that the printer is not designed to handle the filament!

 

I have tried googling it and checking the Ultimaker Community for this but seems like I have come across some old topics.

The attachments by the provider are not available anymore:

https://www.dynamism.com/mosaic/mosaic-palette-ultimakerconversionkit-ums3-s5.html

 

I want to use standard Ultimaker Tough Black PLA along with 1.75mm (different color) filament using dual extruder for my project.

Anyone has solved this problem? Or does it mean and end to a wide range of filaments that are only available in 1.75mm and I will have to buy a cheap china made 3d printer for it.

It's  shame such a high quality almost fully automated printer is beaten by just the width of filament.

 

PS: tried adding custom material with 1.75mm dia, but it throws a warning:

Does anyone know if there is a compatible extruder for this?

 

Edited February 10, 2022 by amitmonash

[danielalexander 0]

Also curious about this.

[gr5 2,210]

Send the filament back!

 

Seriously.  Don't open the box so you can get a refund.

 

So I have converted some printers (and undone the conversion) and I have customers who are happy with the conversion.  3dsolex has a solution that works.  At least for the left bowden.

 

The feeder itself is fine as is.  The UM3/S3/S5 feeders can all work with 1.75 filament just fine as far as I remember.  It's the hot end that can't deal.  The filament will just come backup up out of the core at the same time as out the nozzle and make a mess inside the print core.

 

However 3dsolex has a special 1.75mm print core and they have changable nozzles (nice) so you can get from 0.1mm nozzles up to around 2mm (maybe?  Maybe only 1.5mm?  I forget).

 

But the solution isn't fantastic.  You have to do some trickery with the bowden - it's a double bowden and the inner bowden goes down inside the print core so changing the print core involves removing the bowden (really only takes an extra 30 seconds but still).

 

More importantly the solution doesn't work so well on the right side so you have to do hack solutions to get it to work with 1.75 on the left and 3mm on the right core.

 

I know a guy who got it working on the right core using a special spring so that the right core can go up and down and the inner bowden can go up and down with the core but I'm not sure exactly where to get the right spring (you want 4mm O.D. spring with 2mm I.D. so the 1.75mm filament can pass throught the spring).  And despite all this you have to do weird things with cura like shown above.  Or you have to set the flow in cura to (2.85mm/1.75mm)^2 which is 265%.  So you have to set the flow to 265% if you can't figure out how to get cura to realize the left core is using 1.75mm filament.  Setting the flow to 265% has other repurcussions - the initial purge might under purge.  Retractions might use the flow feature (although I think not).  Minor things that aren't a show stopper but there are repurcussions.

 

And if instead you modify the S5 machine profile to accept 1.75mm filament and you upgrade Cura you will probably have to do all the modifications again.

 

SO MUCH EASIER to just use "3mm" or "2.85mm" filament.  Sometimes people complain "I can't get than in 3mm".  Well I always prove them wrong.  Unless it's some obscure color, every material out there on the planet is available (usually from the same manufacturer) in both sizes.  Every obscure material.  One exception I suppose is prusament which is for prusa printers which is only 1.75mm.

 

BUT YOU CAN DO IT!  Contact 3dsolex by email: sales@3dsolex.com.  They will sell you a 1.75 printcore at no extra cost.  The ONLY customer I know who did this permanently and for good reason did it because he makes his own filament and the 3mm filament was too brittle and cracks in the bowden but the 1.75mm filament works great.  This is a very obscure filament made from Boron or something similar - I forget the details.  It's a very very niche usage.

 

[h2befjon 1]

BUMP. I know this is an old thread but I'm curious to know if there's been any movement on getting the s5 to print using 1.75 filaments. It seems to me that a lot of filament manufacturers are moving away from the 2.85/3mm, especially those that create specialty filaments.  Is this something UM would consider selling a conversion kit considering their other series prints with 1.75mm, or should I look into selling it and getting something else? I really love the Ultimaker brand but I also feel like the last couple of years it's been lacking in innovation.

[mrender 26]

It is becoming difficult to get hold of 2.85mm filaments in a lot of cases now. Surprising that there isn't a conversion kit available from Ultimaker by now.

[gr5 2,210]

Yes!  There is a solution, but first:

 

I haven't had any trouble getting all manner of filaments and colors. I have heard the most complaints about colors. For example in carbon and glass filled filaments there are probably over 100 to choose from.

 

I do have one spool of very old 1.75 and I was able to print some recently using a new trick so I'll share that.  It was quite simple.  This works on S3/S5 but not on UM3 because the UM3 feeder just won't grip the 1.75mm filament. It was a shade of brown that I didn't have in stock and I didn't want to buy more filament when I had a spool already.

 

I got some PFA tubing that was "4X2" meaning 4mm O.D. and 2mm I.D.  I stuck it down into the printcore and marked where it stuck out the top.  Then I cut the tubing there.

 

I reduced retraction by about 2mm but the 4X2 bowden seems to stay pretty well inside the printcore (I was afraid it would slide up).  It worked quite well.

 

I also changed all the "flow" values in cura to 265% (which is 2.85^2/1.75^2).

 

I also had to hand-insert the filament.  Which I always do anyway so no change there. You might have to remove the normal bowden at the head to get the filament started into the smaller tube.  I forget if I had to do that or not - I definitely removed the bowden at least one time.

 

Other than that it worked pretty well.  I printed 2 boxes that were each about 2 hours.

[mrender 26]

Surprising that there isn't a conversion kit available from Ultimaker by now.

[Dustin 150]

UltiMaker does not directly recommend using 1.75mm filament in any S series product. 
So why would UltiMaker release a conversion kit?
The known kits on the market for the UM2/2+ family are not produced or recommended by UltiMaker either.

[mrender 26]

because the dominant filament size is 1.75mm

[gr5 2,210]

Look at it from UM perspective.

 

The offering of filament choices in 3mm is more than it was 5 years ago. A lot of the reasons you can get more colors in 1.75 is that it is supporting a lot more hobbyists (I'm not saying tons of businesses don't use 1.75).  The "S" series printer is not aimed at hobbyists but more to applications like factories that need parts and guides and don't need more than one shade of blue - businesses that need their employees to do the minimum of training, fiddling with their printers.

 

You can get black glass fill nylon or petg GF filament in 3mm from probably 10 different manufacturers. I only see a problem if you want particular colors.  At this time.  If/when UM stops making printers that use 3mm filament, then things might become a problem as you will really see a bigger shift away from 3mm.  It might be very hard to find 3mm filament other than black/gray/white in the most common filaments (PLA, PETG, and a few more).  At that point I think there might be a big market for conversion kits.  But it will be third parties that come up with it most likely.  At that point I might have trouble with my own printers.  We'll see.  I also mostly only use black/white/gray as bright colors make my products look more like a toys.

 

Of course then a few of the UM customers will want 3mm conversion kits to convert their 1.75mm UM printer to 3mm!! 😂

[mrender 26]

That's right, colour choice is certainly where the big difference between the two filament sizes is. The S series are certainly reliable workhorse machines however I've never regarded them as factory machines (nothing wrong with that) maybe not for the hobbyist but more office/design studio very small scale niche batch at a push kit.  Just would have been nice to see some development generally of the S3 and S5 platforms over the years, filament size options, direct drive options and maybe even some control board and coms choices. There were a couple of incremental design advancements but these went into the S7 and Factor 4 machines with "incremental" prices increases.

[Torgeir 250]

Hi there

 

When we talk about this matter, it can be tempting to mention the "competition" among manufacturers of 3d printers as to who has the printer that prints the fastest with good quality. So, how fast can a 3d printer with 1.75 mm filament print? Here, of course, the selected nozzle size plays a role, as you can actually print much faster with a larger nozzle and still have good quality and accuracy on the model. With this in mind, I'm not so sure that 1.75mm size filament will displace 2.85mm type filament, -but rather the opposite may happen (IMHO). But time will tell.

 

An UltiMaker printer can print at a "fairly" high speed with a 0.6 mm or 0.8 mm nozzle.

 

Thanks

Torgeir.

[mrender 26]

Whether one size is better than the other or which 3d printer is the best or fastest isn't really important, but certainly a machine with no filament in it will struggle!🙂

[X-Type 8]

Hi

 

I have used 1.75mm filament in my S5 several times without any issues, no mechanical changes, just changing filament diameter in SW. 

I don't remember exactly now but I seem to remember I made a change in the Extruder settings in Printer settings, I might have made a change in the printer settings as well, not certain about that.

[X-Type 8]

I brought out an old 1.75mm roll of filament to try this again today. Funny enough the end of the filament on the roll still had then 2.85mm "blob" at the end of the roll, it's the blob that comes out of the hot end when you remove the filament from the printer. So there's no doubt this roll of filament has been used in my S5 without any hw modifications.

The print started nicely and it put down the two first layers without any problems, but then the printer stopped and complained about material error, thinking it was out of filament.

I assume the filament detector doesn't get quite enough pressure on the smaller diameter filament. Though it did work before it doesn't today. I'll have to have a look at that, because I do have quite a few rolls of 1.75mm high quality filament that I would like to consume.

[X-Type 8]

I turned off the flow sensor in the S5 settings menu and now it is printing fine. At least so far, 3-4 layers down.

The only thing I did was to change the filament diameter in the Machine/Extruder settings.

I noticed that the filament diameter in the Materials section follows the Machine/Extruder setting, which really is a bit odd IMO, but that's how it works.

[X-Type 8]

I have now printed two spare parts, with threads and dimensional requirements, and they came out great and worked fine. Using 1.75mm cheapo PLA.

So, recipe to run 1.75mm Filament on the UMS5:

1. Change filament diameter to 1.75 in Printer Settings Extruder section in Cura.

2. Turn off Flow sensor on UMS5.

4. Make sure extruder feeder tension is good.

3. Load your filament and print.

 

 

 

[h2befjon 1]

On 6/15/2024 at 1:04 PM, X-Type said:

I have now printed two spare parts, with threads and dimensional requirements, and they came out great and worked fine. Using 1.75mm cheapo PLA.

So, recipe to run 1.75mm Filament on the UMS5:

1. Change filament diameter to 1.75 in Printer Settings Extruder section in Cura.

2. Turn off Flow sensor on UMS5.

4. Make sure extruder feeder tension is good.

3. Load your filament and print.

 

 

 

Did you have to mess with any retraction or other cura settings? Are you printing with the standard .4mm core profiles? Have you tried larger cores, or changing the standard profiles for faster prints?

Edited July 10 by h2befjon