Printing Guide

[Labern 774]

Hi, I'm new to 3D printing and just received my New Ultimaker 2 a few days ago.

After a few trials and printing various items with varied results. I had been reading heaps of posts here on the forum.

I have found some good information but I was wondering if anyone knows of a good book to recommend or any documented format that explains how different settings can effect different prints?

Something that has a basic explanation of material properties, causes of common problems and how to solve them.

Also after looking at the settings in Cura things like wall thickness and speed variances between infill and outer layers. it Has a guide but would like to know a bit more of the background of why these cause differences to the finished results.

[gr5 2,167]

I wish there was something and I wish it was on a wiki so I could add to it. But I don't know of any such thing. Here is a pictorial guide to a few print settings and issues:

http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/1872-some-calibration-photographs/

 

[gr5 2,167]

Actually Robert (IRobertI) has a great guide that he will be publishing within a day or two. It's very visual (lots of photos).

 

[Labern 774]

Actually Robert (IRobertI) has a great guide that he will be publishing within a day or two. It's very visual (lots of photos).

 

Hi gr5

Thanks for the great info. you do really provide some really great stuff on this forum. I had started some trials of my own and your info will save me some time.

I will also look forward to seeing Robert's guide.

It would be good to start something on wiki but I don't know anything at this stage so it would be very empty.

 

[jonnybischof 60]

How difficult is it to set up an online wiki for this? Couldn't we use the UM wiki for this purpose?

I've been thinking of writing a guide for some time as well. But a wiki would be great, too...

 

[DidierKlein 729]

+1 on this.

The forum is full with very valuable information, it would be great to have all the good tips centralised somewhere

 

[zoev89 73]

+1 The forum is great but getting a overview on all the good tips and trick takes hours.. A wiki would help quite bit.

 

[antiklesys 3]

We could also have a section for the UM1 printable/cheap improvements to increase printing quality (such as direct drive which recycles the stock UM1 rods and just requires motor couplers)

 

[Blizz 53]

I was at the UM Evening a couple days back. When they heard I was a fairly recent addition to the community they asked me what I thought could really be improved.

I replied with 2 things:

 

• Introduce a geek mode in the firmware for the UM2, remaining time only is stupid for the techies
  
• Create a central repository for categorised tips and tricks. The community should be able to rate these as to get rid of "less good" tips
  

 

As a n00b I noticed as well that it's a lot of work to actually gather the intel you need and it would be awesome to have that in a central location. Some kind of a categorised wiki with ratings would be perfect.

If they don't want to set it up I might, but it would be cooler if this was also linked to your forum account (no anonymous contributions).

 

[Labern 774]

Yeah I had a look and its not to hard to start a wiki but it would be good to have it on the ultimaker wiki. I will email them to see what they think.

 

[shurik 87]

What can I say reading the replies...

I suggested to Sander to make a FAQ or a well-organized manual back in April... Being working in a training dept. of my company, it's not that much of a big deal for me.

And yet, no really serious replies received. :(

 

[SandervG 1,521]

Hi guys,

I have been working on a tips and tricks document.

It has more to do with how to handle overhangs and what some basic settings may affect your print.

It is not in detail yet on what profile works best. Partially because I believe this also depends on the shape you want to make. And you always have the option, do you want to print fast or high quality?

But I think it is a good idea to collaborate on it, since everyone has a lot of knowledge.

Let me think on where it would be best to share it, so we can all make comments / modifications.

 

[SandervG 1,521]

What can I say reading the replies...

I suggested to Sander to make a FAQ or a well-organized manual back in April... Being working in a training dept. of my company, it's not that much of a big deal for me.

And yet, no really serious replies received. :(

 

Maybe you haven't noticed, but the FAQ/Troubleshoot page has been updated after your message

 

[gr5 2,167]

Robert's guide should get published very soon. Probably within 24 hours. It's a fantastic start - it's really a very good guide and blows away all the other FAQs and attempts I've seen so far so I think it would be a good start and it has a great format and layout. Right now it's just raw html I think.

If we could use that as a basis for the style of the guide we could add to it - both new topics and more details.

Ultimaker already has a wikil. Anyone can create an account on it and anyone could put a guide there. If it was as good as roberts I would start adding to it and also I would link to it for any question easily answered in the guide.

Pretty soon it would be the main place to answer "already answered" questions.

I really am not fond of the layout of the wiki though. I'm not sure if we can cram Robert's format into a wiki.

Also Robert was paid to create this and I don't know if his employer will let us steal the text (and images) from his document as a starting point.

I agree that it would be nice if anyone with an account on this forum also automatically had editing access to the wiki and have the usernames match. I don't think up/down voting is necessary as you can just delete anything that is wrong or move it to smaller font with a note that you disagree. Also wiki's have a discussion page for each actual page where you can discuss what wording to use or why you deleted someone's stuff and give them an opportunity to reword it or whatever. It is scary to let just anyone edit the wiki but in practice it works very well. Plus all wiki's have per page source control so you can go back and undo any edits or look at who did what or show the difference between any two historical versions.

I guess my biggest fear/demotivator is that UM isn't backing up the wiki regularly and that some day it will all be lost. I prefer to work hard on a document that I am able to personally back up in case UM goes out of business or accidentally drops the server to it's death.

If UM would let me mirror (for backup purposes only) the wiki on my own server then I would be much more inclined to put a ton of work into it.