We did some testing regarding the speed boundaries of the Ultimaker. For ABS plastic it lies at approx. 150mm/s feedrate (x,y movement). It could be higher but we ran into flowrate issues occasionally and at high speeds it bonds less to the previous printed layer. PLA is a different story, it is much more sticky and flows better, it reached printing speeds of 350 mm/s during travel and 300mm/s during extrusion. It is not recommended for all kinds of shapes, although there is some loss of shape, objects with some infill will print fine. The part you see printing is a Mendel Z-bearing plate, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1768
The fastest printing time was 9min, the print in the video took 12min at 300mm/s feedrate.
Update: the result with our new 0.4 mm nozzle is even better. No flow rate problems running it at this feed rate, either (with PLA, that is)!
This is just unbelievable! Now I want an Ultimaker EVEN more! (Across the room I hear my Cupcake cry in envy)
Are there any issues with deflecting guidings/bearings at those high speeds?
Greetings from Munich!
The Ultimaker uses precision linear bearings which are easily capable to operate at these speeds with high precision. I already made a lot of prints at these speeds with no problems.
Can’t wait for the Shop to open. I’ll buy one RIGHT AWAY!
Great work!
Hey, someone from Munich!
Let me know when you buy a Ultimaker, I’m curious
Over at the FabLab Munich we have a RapMan and are currently building a Mendel, I’d love to see how these compare to the Ultimaker.
Schoene Gruesse,
Andreas
I’ll keep you up-to-date! I wanted to visit the FabLab soon anyway!
Servus und auf bald!
Bernhard aka. HotKey
Pingback: Tweets that mention Insane Speeds with PLA on Ultimaker | Ultimaker -- Topsy.com
Is this going to be open source?
AFAIK, it is.
When will it be available? Please give us an estimation!!
Wow I do not see my thing o matic working at that speed
Just wondering what steps you have left before you can start selling kits? Any idea what the price will be and when they will be available?
No specific problems, we just want to only ship something that is good. Of course there will always be little issues with the first batch you send out. We want to minimize the problems people might have. For example, we don’t want people to fiddle with (fragile) thermistors anymore so we’re switching to thermocouples by default. Those are more reliable, more accurate and you cannot mishandle and break them. Right now there’s a hole where you shove it in and it measures consistently. This required another PCB which is in production right now. The good news is, we have an awesome extruder that exceeds our own expectations compared to the one we’d been using before.
See this picture of the new Ultimaker hot end of the extruder.
From that photo it doubles my expectations!
I assume the dual extruder be an option in the future and not included with the first Ultimaker kits that will be shipped?
It will be a single extruder machine by default. We won’t prevent you from changing their machines or adding functionality. We want people to experiment, therefor we have multiple spots for toolheads and multiple motor drivers in addition to X, Y and Z.
Oh wow! If it was available, I’d purchase the kit right now.
In your FAQ you said this is primarily a machine for the EU. Will there be enough documentation to build one from scratch with parts sourced in the US? Will individual components, like the extruder, be available from your store and shipped to the US?
I’m not sure where you’ve read that, but only the power cord is different for the US. We have US power cords available so there’s no problem operating one in the US. Martijn
I misread the statement about the VAT .. that it is just for EU. In any case, my other question still stands. Is this designed that we will be able to build this from scratch with US sourced parts? Maybe order specific components from ultimaker?
All parts but one are metric sized I’m not sure if they are widely available in the US, some crucial components are custom made. In some time, when we are up and running, we plan to offer laserless kits or electronics only.
Will the Ultimaker have a heated build platform?
Great test. It would be good test to print something with bit more corners and something where corners actually need precision. I found that ~40mm/sec is the max speed for PLA where sharp corners will stay sharp (printing helical / herringbone gears for e.g.), more then 40mm/sec and the teeth go dull. But yes, even on 3.0 rapman I can print ~300mm/sec (with my own electronics) objects where “dulling” of the corners does not affect the usability of the object. Holes are also huge problem at high speed as they tend to be much smaller then designed. This problem start to grow exponentially after 50mm/sec… with PLA the warping is not a big problem even at 300mm/sec
What does impress me here is the precision you get with bowden drive – I was unable to get any usable precision with bowden at this high speeds, the ooze is so high that stringing was terrible… I do see that you have strings here too, maybe some other object would show better how big the problem stringing is with bowden, but anyhow, this is much better then what I managed to accomplish with bowden.
All in all superb post, thanks a bunch for sharing
b.
It’s hard to actually see the difference between a 50 and 300 mm/s print, so hard that we have to label them in order to not swap them and forget which is which.
About the oozing (admittedly we haven’t solved it completely): this also has to do with the flow resistance of your nozzle and the time it takes between layers. If your printhead quickly goes from site A to B, there isn’t as much time for much oozing. Also, I’m thinking of lowering the nozzle into the material when the extruder is reversing to alleviate the pressure. It does need to be in an area that’s cooled down and flat.
Also, you need to feed forward the fast extrusion rate in the temperature control. Otherwise the pressure increases a lot when you try to extrude faster.
Does the BfB firmware still go to the origin on every layer? This also increases oozes and a lot of hair, too… Maybe you don’t know, since you’ve (understandably) replaced their closed electronics with your own. And reversing needs to be really fast, or otherwise you’d better not reverse at all. With the BfB drive end of the extruder there’s a large screw speed reduction.
Here’s a picture of the part that was printed in this movie at 300 mm/s and 325 mm/s travel:
https://picasaweb.google.com/erikdebruijn1/Ultimaking?authkey=Gv1sRgCMTmmr_H8uu4rgE#5574002555166069666
Because it’s hard to see how sharp the corners still are, here’s another picture of a Mendel vertex:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/w-jiLEvaqEwOWudDthzi9bg43EqgxEYno3v9myjRzRw?feat=directlink
I must make this remark for those who don’t know PLA. Transparent PLA looks messy in pictures while its surface is very regular. This is because you’re looking through the (very consistent) outer shell layer and see the infill pattern behind it.
Any chance of you guys doing a 2-material model that uses separate plastic and support material? I went to Plastec West last week and most of the commercial models are going that route. The support material dissolves in water, which allows for all sorts of elaborate prints not possible with plastic alone.
It’s definitely an interesting way to do this, because all shapes are possible. We will currently concentrate on making the single material machine work well. It’s an open source machine, as a result it should be trivial hacking another extruder onto it (firmware source can be found in our github repository). The rest of the challenge is software related. But again, with a selection of open source software available to you, this can be achieved and you’re probably not alone in this pursuit.
This looks fantastic! I personally can’t wait for kits, but I have a quick Q or two:
Is this 3D printer capable of doing 2D cutting with simple modificaitons, IE milling or laser cutting of light materials (balsa, foam, maybe plastic sheet) and possibly drilling/milling of PCB (thin and light)?
Good question. I think the frame should be able to deal with the really light milling tasks without many modifications, but we haven’t done any actual tests with this. Just by feeling it by hand, the axial play isn’t that big. But keep in mind that the rods are, while they are hardened steel, only 8mm in diameter. This is very low for a milling setup, so these will deflect. So the application needs to be low force. Still, I think it could be quite accurate and I would applaud you if you would experiment with this if you get the chance!
Drilling PCBs should definitely be one of the possibilities. If you get this going that would be very cool. I’ve been secretly working on a pick-n-place tool head. Already did a few pick’s myself, but I don’t have the right pump a.t.m. Mine currently oscillates too much and also pushes away components slightly before picking them up.
Erik, I certainly understand the reason for showing the Ultimaker pushed to it’s limit (or close to it) as far as speed is concerned. However, I’m also interested in slowing down the print speed to get higher quality proof of concept parts before going to aluminum on my CNC mill. May I ask how the quality compares to parts produced on the slightly higher priced Up printer? Do you have any comparison photos you can show?
Hi Dave,
Here’s an example of an Up print and a Ultimaker print side by side. If you have a little more patience, you can print the STL with more detail (with more lines of G-Code) and the surface finish will be identical, however it will take longer to print, we simply didn’t want to wait that long. If you’re looking for higher quality you do need to set the printer slower and process your file with a higher quality (in Skeinforge, this is “Import coarseness” under “Carve”).
I don’t understand what I’m seeing in the movie. I thought this was belt based but it looks like you’re using a threaded rods? How are you getting it to work that fast?
@Gil: No, we can achieve this performance without trapezoid rods, only the Z axis has one. We use belts drives for the X and Y axis.
B.t.w. I just made this video that shows the 3D printing process of a bottle opener.
Here’s a video of a 3D printed ‘gear cube’.
I now realized the video resolution was making me think linear bearings were threaded rods.
Hi Erik
I visit your site daily to check if the shop is open. Do you have any releaseday for the opening of your lovely invention?
I am prepared to drive to Denmark to Netherland for a pickup if logistic is a problem!
Congratulations to the Ultimaker design team! The kit is quite easy to put together. However, it would be nice to have some working PLA profiles. The ones that come with the Ultimaker software pack run at around 200C and this seems to be too cold for the PLA to come out fast enough, so the extruder motor skips or grinds the filament. Come on guys! Post some baseline PLA profiles that you know print well. I agree that each printer nozzle assembly may differ in its performance, but at least we can have a starting point to play from.
Thanks in advanve.
-Murat.
As you may know for a while already, a better, failsafe print profile has been added by now. This should get people started more quickly.
Pingback: 3D-Druck in ultraschnell | stk
Pingback: The Year of 2011 in 3D Printing | 3D Print Plan | All about 3D Printing
Pingback: 3D Printing Plan | 3D Printing News and Updates» Blog Archive » The Year of 2011 in 3D Printing
good to see the price for 3D printers continuously coming down. now wee just need a US version
Hello!
I already printed on an Ultimaker but how is it possible to print without having these threads over the places where the printing head needs to travel. E.g. from the head to the ears. How do you do it? And what temperature are you using?
Thank you!
Cheers,
Salocin
Hi Salocin,
You hav to tweak your retraction settings, check our google forum here to get more detailed information
What is the speed of the ultimaker in cm3/h ?
hi Luuk,
Maximum speed is 36cm3 per hour. But that is the lowest quality off course.