z height digging in as the part goes along?

[holto 0]

So, newb here again.

I keep printing simple shapes and the calibration tube and after about 4-5mm the heads starts to get deeper and deeper into the part... of course that winds up pushing plastic around and by the end of a build the extruder is about 2-3mm into the part basically just cutting a route around the part... I'm going to take a photo and post here in a sec.

It gets worse as the part gets taller, I should mention.

Thanks for any help. I'm pretty ignorant with most of this still.

[Daid 306]

What software are you using? Because it sounds like you are "over extruding"

[holto 0]

Hey guys,

So, I got to digging around last night and took the bottom panel off (I bought the Ultimaker fully assembled) After some mucking about on Google I found a very small reference to how the jumpers should be set on the axis connections. It appears that the z Axis was closed. Put it to open and it's already performing MUCH better. I still have calibration to do, but it's about a million time less worrisome that last night. Hahaha.

I also went back and attempted to realign all the axis rods, etc. Seems to have taken some of the warping perimeters out as well.

Feeling much better now. AHahaha.

My first instinct is to print a whole bunch of spare parts in case something were to break.

I do think I mat need to grease everything really well.

For some reason I can only get Slic3r to work right... When I go SF I get a weird thign where it spits out a bunch of plastic in the printing spot and then starts printing with not filament being extruded. Really weird.

Two things I would love to know... How/where do I adjust the "wait" time to let a lyer cool between prints rounds and how can I generate supports with the PLA? Do those break off fairly easy?

Thanks for all the help. This forum has already been an invaluable place for knowledge.

I ordered NetFabb last night but still haven't gotten a download link from Ultimaker. I'll excited to see if that makes a big difference.

Cheers,

Holto

[Daid 306]

If you want to give SF a shot, you might want to try Cura:

https://github.com/daid/Cura/wiki

Which is a user friendly interface around the Skeinforge engine. Defaults are good for the Ultimaker, so it should require no tweaking on the software side, giving you the ability to focus on hardware problems.

[holto 0]

Hi Daid,

Thanks for the info. I tried downloading Cura (I'm on OSX) and I didn't know what I needed to do to get the GUI. I tried loading the files in Python, but nothing happens there. Sorry, I'm not much of a programmer beyond web bits.

Can you give me a clue to running it? I'd love to try it out.

Thanks in advance.

- david

[joergen 2]

Thanks for the info. I tried downloading Cura (I'm on OSX) and I didn't know what I needed to do to get the GUI. I tried loading the files in Python, but nothing happens there. Sorry, I'm not much of a programmer beyond web bits. Can you give me a clue to running it? I'd love to try it out. Thanks in advance.

all I can say, it's a bit complicated, and involves terminal typing. if that is not your cup of tea, I'd wait until it works under OS X (I can't get it working either).

Most are using parallels (or similar) and windows (virtually) without any/many glitches to run Cura.