Thinking of getting a UM2

[luke.marsh96 0]

Hello everyone!

I'm an entrepreneur looking to get a 3d printer to prototype my product, and manufacturer it on a small scale until I can afford to take it to China.

Is there a big difference between the original and the 2nd model? As i can get basically 2 of the original one for the same price as the 2nd model? what is the differences between the two?

As i'll be using it to manufacturer the product on a small scale, speed and quality is probably my highest priority and that is why I am edging towards the UM 2 compared to other printers on the market in that price range.

What will happen to the printer if its constantly printing?

how many hours a day do you recommend?

What parts are most likely to fail when doing a lot of printing?

What precautions should i take? Such as keeping the room cool, as little dust as possible, a fan on the printer?ect.

If my printer breaks, how long should i expect to wait if i have to send it off to be repaired?

how hard are they to repair your selves? A bit of a vague question as it depends on the problem, but any information will be great.

Do you have to have the computer plugged into the printer for the whole print?

What are the best/cheapest filaments you can get for the printer, PLA and ABS?

Whats the software it comes with like? ( I am a complete newbie at 3d modelling)

The speed of the print varies between what quality setting I am on, can different parts of a single print be done with different qualities to increase the speed?

I may have some more questions, i hope you can help me!

Thank you very much for taking your time to read, i really appreciate it.

Luke

 

[gr5 2,167]

Too many questions!

The two printers print with the same quality as far as I can tell. I have one of each. But I usually use the UM2. The kit takes quite a long time to put together (took me about 40 hours - I guess I'm not very fast) and I ran into lots of snags but figured it all out eventually. So if you don't mind "wasting" 40 hours then go UMO I think.

If you are printing extra small things and want extra good qualtiy (e.g. jewelry) then you will want to get a .25mm nozzle which you can get for either machine now through 3rd party sellers.

PLA is a newer technology and almost everyone prints PLA these days but still lots of people are die hard ABS people. Both materials are fantastic. The main advantage of ABS is that it can be left on a car seat on a hot sunny summer day and it won't melt like PLA will. This is pretty important for many people. PLA is much easier to print with and less hassle and comes out looking a little bit nicer especially if you are new at this.

Many people on the forum print non-stop. It's fine.

Both printers are very easy to service. You pretty much need only one tool - a screwdriver version of a 2mm hex allen wrench and you can take apart everything on both printers with very few exceptions (I think there's one screw that's 1.5mm and that's it on the um2).

Customer support even expects you to take things apart as they often just send you for example a new circuit board.

Customer support is not great (well it's a bit slow but they are great people and smart) but it's typical of 3d printer companies and support is probably much better than makerbot.

Make sure you get an open system that uses open firmware and open slicers and such - no one realizes how incredibly important this is until it's too late. For example lulzbot is open. And ultimaker of course.

Don't worry about spares or precautions.

Could be as much as 2 weeks to get repaired if you are unlucky - more likely 1 week. Much faster in USA.

It's best *not* to plug computer in at all - ultimaker works best if it prints from SD card (included).

 

The speed of the print varies between what quality setting I am on, can different parts of a single print be done with different qualities to increase the speed?

 

See? Here's where you absolutely need open source. There are plugins to Cura - "tweak at Z" that will let you change speeds part way through the print. It already lets you print infill faster than outer shell.

Download Cura for free and check it out. Get any STL model from thingerverse.com and load it into cura and slice it and look at it in slice view and slide the slider around.

software.ultimaker.com

For CAD software - if you are doing things like parts, covers, mechanical stuff get (it's free) "design spark mechanical". Like all cad it has a bit of a learning curve to be efficient. If you are more of an artist and want to model things like animals or people then don't get dsm! I forget what the most popular artist software is that is free right now. zbrush is popular but I believe that's expensive. Maybe meshmixer? or blender? or meshlab? (all free) I really don't know.

 

[yellowshark 153]

Faberdashery(UK) and colorFabb(Holland) are two of the best filament manufactures in Europe. IMHO it is not worth buying cheap filament, especially if you are doing real production. In our business model the filament is normally a small percentage of the final price and so buying cheap filament is nonsensical - I guess it could be different for you. If you need a really smooth finish, like injection moulding, then take a look at the XTC-3D brush on coating, it is great! We are using it for an automotive external body part which needs to be spray painted without any further finishing and as smooth as all the other body panels.

Generally speed and quality are mutually exclusive; fast for prototyping and slow for production (unless the product is going to be hidden away and not seen).

I stand to be corrected but I think TweakAtZ can only be used once during a print, which may be fine. But if you have a geometry where the speed can changed at several points in a print without negative impact and TweakAtZ does not do it, the Simply3d will. It costs $150 and can provide a variety of benefits; there are people on the forum who use and would be better qualified than myself to comment. With the right geometry it is certainly a way of delivering good quality but reducing time and cost.

Unlike modern day computers 3D printing at this level is not plug and play. If you need to achieve high quality repeatable production then be prepared to invest many hours learning, especially if you will have multiple products that pose different challenges.

 

[Dim3nsioneer 557]

I stand to be corrected but I think TweakAtZ can only be used once during a print, which may be fine. But if you have a geometry where the speed can changed at several points in a print without negative impact and TweakAtZ does not do it, the Simply3d will. It costs $150 and can provide a variety of benefits; there are people on the forum who use and would be better qualified than myself to comment. With the right geometry it is certainly a way of delivering good quality but reducing time and cost.

 

Here comes the correction...

TweakAtZ can be used in multiple instances, just add it once more to the list. However, depending on the print, it might be quite painful to use it more than five times as it reprocesses the whole gcode for each instance.

But on an UM2, the second instance of the TweakAtZ plugin 'sees' the changes of the first one and is able to use these settings even if it's a dimension you usually set at the machine like temperature.

 

See? Here's where you absolutely need open source. There are plugins to Cura - "tweak at Z" that will let you change speeds part way through the print. It already lets you print infill faster than outer shell.

 

Just to avoid any misunderstandings: It's Cura itself which allows for printing the infill faster than the outer shell, not the TweakAtZ plugin...

 

[yellowshark 153]

Thanks @Dim3nsioneer, I did not think of trying that

 

[luke.marsh96 0]

Wow! Cant believe all these great responses! I really do appreciate this a lot, its helping me loads!

I'm an entrepreneur not a 3d designer so I'm having a little difficulty understanding some of the things you are saying so will do further research on the information you have provided. But this forum is really making me think I'll go with ultimaker with such good online feedback and help. I'll be downloading Cura and will be having a look at that, that sounds perfect for what i was looking for.

A few more questions:

How confusing to a complete novice in 3d printing will adjusting the settings to get the final print to come out as good as possible, is there a lot of guides on the internet that will help me get the best possible product?

What is the easiest software to use to 3d model a product, as this is something I am struggling with, and may have to employ someone to do this, but I need to keep my start up costs to an absulute minimal so if i can avoid doing that, that would be great. Is there any software you feel offers a lot of help showing you how to do different things, and is easy to use, and obviously compatible to a 3d printer?

I apologise for all these questions, but you guys are doing excellent!

Thank you a huge amount,

Luke

 

[Labern 774]

When it comes to 3D CAD it really depends on how your brain works, What is easy for some is confusing for others.

you have to find one that works for you. I would not recommend Sketchup, its free and easy to use but its not that good when you want to print what you have just drawn and for small objects. If you don't mind cloud then give ONSHAPE a try. its also free and simple, there are heaps of videos and tutorials of how everything works and how to get started. Plus you can email them if you get stuck.

Its really a matter of trying out heaps and finding one that you can understand quickly and works for you.

In cura there are Quick print settings, you can try with those first and if you run into problems then check out these guides http://support.3dverkstan.se/category/31-guides%C2%A0

they are really helpful at understanding what is going wrong with your prints.

If you still cant sus it then jump on the forum here and ask away. there are always friendly people that can point you in the right direction.

 

[luke.marsh96 0]

When it comes to 3D CAD it really depends on how your brain works, What is easy for some is confusing for others.

you have to find one that works for you. I would not recommend Sketchup, its free and easy to use but its not that good when you want to print what you have just drawn and for small objects. If you don't mind cloud then give ONSHAPE a try. its also free and simple, there are heaps of videos and tutorials of how everything works and how to get started. Plus you can email them if you get stuck.

Its really a matter of trying out heaps and finding one that you can understand quickly and works for you.

In cura there are Quick print settings, you can try with those first and if you run into problems then check out these guides http://support.3dverkstan.se/category/31-guides

they are really helpful at understanding what is going wrong with your prints.

If you still cant sus it then jump on the forum here and ask away. there are always friendly people that can point you in the right direction.

 

Thank you very much!

where is ONSHAPE available to download for free? as I couldn't see anywhere to get it.

Is there any other free software you would recommend using? I've been trying to use sketchup but not getting along with it very well, not good for finer details that i am trying to achieve.

 

[gr5 2,167]

Before choosing CAD, answer the question - are you designing things like iphone covers, gears, boxes, mechanical parts? Or are you designing things like horses, trees, heads, people, rocks, cartoon characters?

This is very important as you want totally different software.

If you start a new business you need to understand that you are going to have to give up some major time. In other words: no TV for a year. None. If you can't do that you probably shouldn't start your own business. Learning CAD really isn't that hard. There's tons of video and web tutorials for all major cad packages out there. ONSHAPE is very new so I'm not sure how much online help there is but probably plenty.

Learning CAD software is a big time investment so don't choose too quickly. One trick is to google the name of the software along with something like say "rotate part" and see how many google hits there are versus some other CAD software - usually this can give you an idea of how much is out there on the internet. Doing the above for onshape gets 64 results versus 2000 for autocad, 97 for DSM, 400 for sketchup (don't use sketchup!). Maybe "rotate part" was a bad example - maybe I should have done "change color" or "calculate area". Anyway I noticed the autocad query pulled up some nice tutorial videos.

You can be up and using CAD within 5 hours and generating useful stuff but it will be frustratingly slow. To be super fast at it takes a year or more. At that point switching will be not worth it. In fact withint 5 hours of starting you will feel like you invested too much time to switch CAD.

 

[luke.marsh96 0]

Before choosing CAD, answer the question - are you designing things like iphone covers, gears, boxes, mechanical parts? Or are you designing things like horses, trees, heads, people, rocks, cartoon characters?

This is very important as you want totally different software.

If you start a new business you need to understand that you are going to have to give up some major time. In other words: no TV for a year. None. If you can't do that you probably shouldn't start your own business. Learning CAD really isn't that hard. There's tons of video and web tutorials for all major cad packages out there. ONSHAPE is very new so I'm not sure how much online help there is but probably plenty.

Learning CAD software is a big time investment so don't choose too quickly. One trick is to google the name of the software along with something like say "rotate part" and see how many google hits there are versus some other CAD software - usually this can give you an idea of how much is out there on the internet. Doing the above for onshape gets 64 results versus 2000 for autocad, 97 for DSM, 400 for sketchup (don't use sketchup!). Maybe "rotate part" was a bad example - maybe I should have done "change color" or "calculate area". Anyway I noticed the autocad query pulled up some nice tutorial videos.

You can be up and using CAD within 5 hours and generating useful stuff but it will be frustratingly slow. To be super fast at it takes a year or more. At that point switching will be not worth it. In fact withint 5 hours of starting you will feel like you invested too much time to switch CAD.

 

Thanks for your reply!

Its an phone cover with a compartment to put certain personal possessions in.

And major time... your telling me! turned 18 4 months ago, left school at 17, been working 50 hours a week since to raise money for my business, all the time i spend not working, i'm working on my business, not an easy life, but will be worth it one day!

And as long as it pays off, i don't mind! Really eager to learn how to do it!

Thank you for your advice!

Luke

 

[mcgyvr 2]

I'd recommend looking at Fusion 360 from Autodesk...

free for non-commercial or 30/month (or 300/year) for commercial use..

Much cheaper than Solidworks/Inventor,etc...

 

[jameshs 42]

I would also recommend for a low cost start up option using something like 3dhubs - you could benefit from the knowledge of a hubster (is that even a word) with printers near you without ANY capital outlay - no repairs, no weeks off as there are loads of hubs and the prices are broadly similar.

While printers are getting more print and play, they are still a bit like a well designed hammer - in skilled hands they look easy, in less experienced hands they are lumps of metal on handles.

for true scalability look at a situation where you get 100 orders in a day (which your local hubs could easily handle) so every case you make you know you are making some money, as opposed to the capital cost of setting up, where you then have a minimum order number to cover your learning.

Then, when you have proven the viability and want to bring production in-house you can become a manufacturer (as well as marketeer, inventor, designer, post room, etc etc - take the difficult non-scalable bit out of the equation

PS - I would always recommend getting a printer - but a year down the line and you may still be learning the winkles!

 

[nautiluschang 0]

As I can see, the ultimata 2 makes better print.

 

[luke.marsh96 0]

I would also recommend for a low cost start up option using something like 3dhubs - you could benefit from the knowledge of a hubster (is that even a word) with printers near you without ANY capital outlay - no repairs, no weeks off as there are loads of hubs and the prices are broadly similar.

While printers are getting more print and play, they are still a bit like a well designed hammer - in skilled hands they look easy, in less experienced hands they are lumps of metal on handles.

for true scalability look at a situation where you get 100 orders in a day (which your local hubs could easily handle) so every case you make you know you are making some money, as opposed to the capital cost of setting up, where you then have a minimum order number to cover your learning.

Then, when you have proven the viability and want to bring production in-house you can become a manufacturer (as well as marketeer, inventor, designer, post room, etc etc - take the difficult non-scalable bit out of the equation

PS - I would always recommend getting a printer - but a year down the line and you may still be learning the winkles!

 

Thank you so much. I have really taken on board what you have said and will definitely be looking into that, that's really useful information, i really appreciate it!

 

[luke.marsh96 0]

Thank you so much. I have really taken on board what you have said and will definitely be looking into that, that's really useful information, i really appreciate it!

 

I have just been looking, and I see a lot of price per print, but I don't see any where I can get it from that does it in bulk to keep costs down?

Thanks

[danilius 118]

This will probably come as a surprise to most CAD users - but I use Blender for a lot of CAD work, simply because it's the tool I use the most for my day-to-day work, and whatever package you use, the files end up as polygons anyway. Also, I can show the client a photo-real render or animation before I print out whatever it is I have designed for them, all in the same program.

Here is a warning though: Blender has an insane learning curve. Yes, it does organic shapes brilliantly, can sculpt, and even does CAD in a strange way, but it is very, very difficult to get up to speed with it quickly.

Why mention it then? Because I produce useable and printable designs with it very quickly, since it lends itself to be used as a CAD sketchbook, so to speak. A basic idea takes very little time to create. With experience, you will be able to refine the initial "sketch" and improve it until it is done.

So, Blender is not your obvious choice for CAD, but you might want to consider it for the above reasons.

Oh, and it's open-source and has a great community.