Support material not printing

[david-hogendoorn 0]

Hey everyone,

So I'm VERY new to the ultimaker experience although I have some experience with a solidoodle and some very bad experience with a makerbot 5th Gen so I'm not too much of a newbie in terms of 3d printing.

The printer prints everything fine expect for some reason it refuses to print support material. The box is checked, I even switched from "quick print" to "full settings" and selected "Everywhere" but it still won't print support, this has forced me to abort prints half-way through and investigate different options.

That was last night, I walked in this morning and Cura asked me to download their latest version 15.02.1. As I'm writing this I'm noticing that it's printing support material and the only things I've changed are these:

-New version of Cura

-I noticed some parts of the bottom layer weren't sticking and the walls of the print weren't touching all the way around. The feeder was also tocking which led me to suspect under-extrusion. This was resolved by increasing the temperature to 225C and turning the print speed down to 90%

-I changed support type from "lines" to "grid"

So all of those changes were made at once and now the UM2 prints support material, I'm just curious to as what change made that possible, could it be the software, or was under-extrusion stopping the support from being extruded. Here are some pictures:

 

 

 

[gr5 2,172]

Always view your part in "layer view" before printing. Support is in a teal/cyan color. You want "support everywhere" which is needed to have the support material place *on top* of a portion of your part to support a different portion of your part.

Sometimes if "brim" is enabled it messes up the support. Also the area might be too small for Cura to consider adding support. This may print better than you think even though it's "in the air". It may take a few layers to recover but it will sort of work with no support.

Personally I would design my own support in CAD and have it just barely touch the very end of the upper "rod".