A Coffee between friends :-) How was Your Day ?

[LePaul 300]

So far...none. But having a thunderstorm roll thru 75% into a 4 hour print motivated me !

[Labern 765]

I had a 16 hour print fail at 15 hours 40min.

[LesHall 95]

I've got a big ole APC BACK-UPS 550 on my Ultimaker 2+. Ain't that the stuff? Under ideal conditions the UPS would not matter but I figure the power in anyplace could use a little helper on the input side of equipment. Say the power fluctuates - does the print quality change? That's a good reddit question. I may be wrong but I'd imagine it might have some effect on print details, however minor that may be.

I just knew this printer was the best thing since sliced bread for my room / workshop and it will be years before I get another such toy so I thought it would be nice to protect it with a UPS. I had one BIG problem out of the box involving the filament getting tangled with the black mesh, then when I fixed that the printer has since operated flawlessly. It is such a dream machine compared to the Printrbot that I'm glad I got the UPS.

I don't want to come across uppity cause life has been full of challenges for me, it's just that it sure has been a joy to own and operate this machine!

Les

[valcrow 144]

 

We use UPS's on a regular basis for the printers. Can't let those 40 hr print timelapses fail or we loose days!

we found 2x 2's with heated beds and 1x go is the limit before the UPS starts to whine.

 

Which is the longest failed print you've ever experienced? For any reason, not only power loss.

(this question goes for everyone)

 

I've had one of these guys fail at 40 hours (46 hr print) Support fell over causing a big X shift.

This one was a 36 ish hour one. (Not really that huge (in volume) but layer height was like 0.09)

Eventually I had to re-do it with a bigger nozzle to drop the time down. Failed because of support design flaw (me)

But final print was quite pretty.

I've had a few airplane parts fail too, which are like 60 micron prints at the full EXT size. 30ish hour prints again. So biggest print fails are usually around 32-40 I would say.

BUT! I have to say since the UM2+ came out. much less fails at the longer prints that are the printers fault.

[SandervG 1,430]

Probably somewhere in 30-36 hours :(

[skint 61]

I had a 18 hour print fail when it reached 16 hours..... twisted filament! :(

[Titus 170]

Back when I had no heated bed, leveling wasn't great, was using cheap and bad filament and I didn't have full control over the printer I had 8 hour prints printing parts for mini robots fail so often I ended up printing in the bathroom at night to keep the sound out of my student room.

For the entry of the mini Ultimaker I wanted to ninja clean some stringing before it curled up, print head hit my hand and snapped a part right of, just an hour before the deadline

And the most recent, also highest print I ever did I didn't realize the stuff I put under the bed as garbage can stop the bed from going down further, leading to a 7:25 fail of a 7:30 print

[LesHall 95]

I'm not one who minds the print lines that much. I know that 0.1 mm layer height is way better than the 0.25mm that I print at with a 0.4mm nozzle, it's just that most prints really don't need that level of precision.

It's kind of like we all want to pretend that we are not using 3D printers, that the parts are injection molded smooth and we are hiding the fact that they are 3D printed. I say celebrate the print lines - they are characteristic of our art so I welcome the print lines! I admire the print lines in fact, hahah. Well.. maybe not, they are non-idealities after all. Still, I kinda like them.

Those 40 hour prints will go by in 10 or 15 hours if we print them at more realistic layer heights so my choice would be to post-process the lines away if they are not desired in the final print. Well, I'm rambling and the point has been made so I'll stop lol.

Les

[SandervG 1,430]

I'm not one who minds the print lines that much.  I know that 0.1 mm layer height is way better than the 0.25mm that I print at with a 0.4mm nozzle, it's just that most prints really don't need that level of precision.  

It's kind of like we all want to pretend that we are not using 3D printers, that the parts are injection molded smooth and we are hiding the fact that they are 3D printed.  I say celebrate the print lines - they are characteristic of our art so I welcome the print lines!  I admire the print lines in fact, hahah.  Well.. maybe not, they are non-idealities after all.  Still, I kinda like them.  

Those 40 hour prints will go by in 10 or 15 hours if we print them at more realistic layer heights so my choice would be to post-process the lines away if they are not desired in the final print.  Well, I'm rambling and the point has been made so I'll stop lol.  

Les

 

Reminds me of an old blog, which I have always really liked and helped me create a different frame of referencec.

Edited July 21, 2016 by Guest

[LePaul 300]

On a similar note of "Where my prints fail/blow up"...

Anyone else get the filament jams when near the bottom 1/4 of a spool? I made sure the filament movement was smooth, no tangles....but that extreme angle just plugged up the hole into the UMO feeder.

My solution was to just remove the remainder of the filament from the spool and let it hang of the side of the desk.

[flowalistik 181]

Wow, we've all wasted a lot of filament! I've never had a very big fail, but it happens a lot that a print fails when it's about to finish. I think my biggest failed print was 8 hours, not more, but I also don't remember printing anything that took more than 10-11 hours.

@LesHall you're not alone. I'm a big fan of the lines, as it reminds me it was 3D printed. I always use very big layer heights when printing with wood or metal based filaments so I can post-process them really nice and still show the lines.

@LePaul that filament issue is really common, as the inner diameter is really small the filament is curved, and if you try to stretch it, it just breaks. I usually change the spool when there's 1/5 left and I use it on my Prusa i3 as it's less picky with filament curvature.

@Titus I've also had some failed prints because of the things I keep inside the printer (it's Ultimaker's fault for making their printer box-shaped, as it makes me want to use it as a tool box).

[LesHall 95]

I actually did post the question on Reddit of whether a UPS helps with print quality and the answer, which I kinda figured it would mostly be was no... The UPS will help with slow brownouts and such but the Power regulation plus stepper drivers plus the nature of the steppers themselves adds up to a system that does not flux with power changes, be they fast or slow. Makes sense to me.

Les

[LePaul 300]

Well of course, it's like a laptop versus a desktop PC. Power flickers shut your desktop PC down. A laptop has the battery built in to drop to should AC power drop.

You don't need Reddit for that answer

[nallath 876]

I've never had my prints fail due to power. Last time we had a power surge here was like ~5 years ago when an Apache helicopter flew into a powerline. That's actually the only time that I remember that we had any kind of power outage.

Is America that bad with providing continuous power? (or is it just that good in the Netherlands?)

[LesHall 95]

Well of course, it's like a laptop versus a desktop PC.  Power flickers shut your desktop PC down.  A laptop has the battery built in to drop to should AC power drop.  

You don't need Reddit for that answer  

 

Yes, well, I was thinking of subtleties such as fluctuations in voltage could make the steppers step quicker, then you've got a mechanical dynamic that could leave a bit of a defect in the print. I do have a system understanding since I've got a MS EE degree and have pondered printer architecture closely. The thing is I get lost in complexity when the answer really is as simple as you reason! My bad, carry on...

Les

[LesHall 95]

I've never had my prints fail due to power. Last time we had a power surge here was like ~5 years ago when an Apache helicopter flew into a powerline. That's actually the only time that I remember that we had any kind of power outage.

Is America that bad with providing continuous power? (or is it just that good in the Netherlands?)

 

I live in a Nursing Home in a small town just outside of San Antonio, Texas, and we had some flooding that interrupted the power recently. Plus my previous printer kept failing catastrophically on longer print jobs and I suspected gremlins at work, either that or an overheating component perhaps.

In Florida the power system was dual redundant to handle hurricanes after a lawsuit accused the FP&L of negligence for not having a quick recovery system in place. That was cool as I once heard an explosion which was a transformer blowing itself up from the heat of the sun, followed by an outage that did not last long thanks to the dual redundant power.

In North Carolina in the 90's there were issues with ice taking down power lines in the winter. The lines were not at all redundant because the ice was a rare phenomenon but it seemed to happen every winter for a while.

So there are three datapoints - natural disasters mainly being the reason for outages.

Les

[LesHall 95]

 

...delete fro brevity...

I'm not one who minds the print lines that much.

Les

 

Reminds me of an old blog, which I have always really liked and helped me create a different frame of referencec.

 

Nice article, thanks Sander (go read, it's short and says a lot!). I have also found in the past that using a larger nozzle size combined with a layer height of 75% nozzle size will really lay down the plastic for those large hollow prints of vases and earths and my Earth Drop on YouMagine (Earth Drop).

[SandervG 1,430]

I especially like how we are OK with getting a splinter in our finger from wood, cause it is wood. That is what is suppose to happen. It is part of wood. But we are still struggling to look past the layers in a 3D print, because plastic objects are injection molded in our minds. Hopefully, one day we will appreciate 3D printing for what it is, with its layers, big or small, and all the other great that comes with it.

[LesHall 95]

Yeah, Sander, and I suppose if we are to meditate on that theme a bit, well we might realize it as a general principle. That we should accept things for what they really are rather than try to fit into some predetermined box that we have in our minds.

We are always striving for perfection and maybe we should be accepting of things for what they are. Like the sculptor Rodin who sculpted "The Thinker" as probably his most famous work. I learned once that when the clay developed a crack from drying, he would just leave the crack there rather than try to "fix" it. He is now a historic artist and those cracks are preserved in all of his works.

Maybe we should take a lesson from Rodin and just learn to love our print lines?

Les

[gr5 1,602]

I had a 30 hour print fail due to too many retractions grinding down the filament on a large eiffel tower print. I was able to continue the print at the time - at the time I couldn't deal with it and left the heated bed on over night (so it wouldn't pop off) and was able to continue it the next day. Back then we didn't have the amazing tinkergnome marlin so I had to edit the gcode by hand and only had one shot to get it perfect. Now you can just continue a failed print with tinkerMarlin.

[SandervG 1,430]

Back then we didn't have the amazing tinkergnome marlin so I had to edit the gcode by hand and only had one shot to get it perfect.  Now you can just continue a failed print with tinkerMarlin.

 

I didn't know this. .. that is amazing! How does it work?

[gr5 1,602]

in tinkerMarlin you just go into advanced menu and select "continue print" and then you choose which print on the SD card and then it asks the extra questions "Z height". You dial in the starting Z height and it continues the print from there - sometimes it takes a few minutes to read many megabytes of gcodes until it gets to the correct height.

[tinkergnome 862]

Well, it's no universal solution for all failed prints...

It works the same way like you would do it manually: skip all layers until the specified height is reached and start printing from there.

And don't forget to make sure, that the heated bed stays hot all the time (immediately heatup the buildplate after the print is aborted).

I rarely have a need for it, but just in case:

You can use the "Move axis" function (or pronterface) to determine the correct z-height. Home all axis, move the (cold!) nozzle above a suitable spot of the printed object and move the buildplate upwards until the nozzle touches the last (fully) printed layer.

[Kevparang 10]

Thanks for asking, how was your day?

Yesterday it was good, played some games,when outside, helped on the forums and did more research, designed.

[xeno 107]

Went to the T-Rex exhibit here in leiden Holland, and this is an Impressive T-Rex,

the most complete T-rex found.

They made some 3D printed parts and castings from other T-rex skeletons to make it complete, and it is a beauty

And what did I find at the end of the exhibit, an Ultimaker print farm of 9 Ultimakers, and this: