Ultimaker

A few quick notes about our 3D printing setup. On advice from our good friend Vik Oliver in New Zealand, we decided to start with an Ultimaker kit.

Software

We primarily drive our Ultimaker with Cura.

So far, everything we've printed has been designed by someone else, but we expect to use OpenSCAD and FreeCAD to design things in the future.

Here are the upgrades we've made so far to the hardware:

Redesigned the hot-end bowden tube clamp. Apparently lots of people have trouble with the stock design, and the most popular upgrade path is to print Owen's Bowden Clamp. That would have been fine if we could keep the printer going long enough! In the end, I found a brass 1/4" OD compression to 1/8" MIP adapter at our local Lowes to use instead. Since I own a set of taps that includes one compatible with 1/8" MIP, it was a simple matter to tap the hole in the top plywood plate on the "hot end", then use a 1/4" drill to open up the hole in the MIP end of the adapter so that the plastic Bowden tube could slide all the way through the adapter. We discarded the brass tubing insert, and used the compression ring and nut to clamp down on the tubing after getting everthing adjusted just right. Works perfectly!
Printed an improved fan duct / shroud for the hot end. The stock fan shroud allows air to blow directly on the nozzle, which was giving us fits trying to figure out what the right printing temps were. We ended up printing one of Owen's Fan Ducts, specifically the "more clearance front nozzle" version, and despite the fact that it came out pretty rough, it works brilliantly.
Printed an improved z-axis stop fine adjuster, because the stock mechanical switch was just too hard to adjust, and we got tired of having to manually tweak the Z axis leadscrew at the start of every print. This isn't installed yet, but we hope it will be just what we need!

Notes about things learned or observed along the way:

Keep the machine tight! Any looseness in the belts, stepper mounting bolts, t-nut and screw combinations holding things together, etc, will make the machine "sloppy" and lead to crappy results.

We're actually pretty happy with how the printer is working now .. will add more here as we learn more with it!