A teacher asked me recently,

A teacher asked me recently, wheter he should buy a standard or an Ultimaker2 for his school. I know the the pros and cons from the old UM pretty good. But I have no experience with the UM2. What would you recommend?

UM is currently on sale -25% and thus half the price of an UM2.
But in the long run the UM2 may be better…

I recommend the UM-Original. It’s very fit for schools due to the tinker-ability.
It’s nowhere near outdated or anything. And you have experience with it, which is a huge plus.

(As for half the price, do not forget that it’s the kit vs UM2 assembled)

Did he say why he was considering only an Ultimaker? it would be good to know the reason.

@Kenneth_Cummings likely because the Ultimaker is pretty much hands-down the best printer that actually supports the open source community.

@Kenneth_Cummings No, he did not. But I suppose that in his community its the first choice.

It has a good point in that the enclosure could keep little fingers from getting burned or mashed, preventing law suits. The enclosure could help in temperature control. I prefer my exposed machine so I can enjoy seeing the moving parts like wire wrapped cables at work.

@ThantiK are you running an ultimaker 1?

@Jarred_Baines I’ve got experience with tons of different machines. UM1, MendelMax, Prusa Mendel (and practically any variation thereof), Prusa i3, Bukobot, Ingentis, Doboz 2 (H-bot), Printrbot (Old printed version), Printrbot Jr, Printrbot LC, Wallace, Rostock, Rostock Mini, DeltaMaker, ORD-bot…

@ThantiK what’s the most reliable (unobserved, multi-hour prints) at this point?
I guess the Ultimaker 2.

Honestly, my hackerspace got a donated UM1, which I merely “observed” being assembled, and only helped out whenever the instructions were unclear. I, at the time, knew about aligning the cross bars so I ended up aligning the whole machine. But by FAR, the UltiMaker, even taken the abuse that it’s received by inexperienced users has held up and can do multi-hour prints still. It rarely fails, and generally it’s not the machine that screws up, it’s someones print parameters. (Trying to print something like the star-trek enterprise at 10% scale)

Only time I’ve seen it screw up, was because someone put in flexible filament that was incorrectly marked “PLA” (It was actually polyvinyl acetate) – and even then, it almost fully printed a rubbery Raspberry Pi case.

@ThantiK and out of all those ultimaker 1 FTW?

I’ve been looking at the double-gantry style system and it seems the best based on other CNC machines I know about (mills mostly)

I had been tossing up whether h-bot or ultimaker was a better design in theory but, since you’re here :slight_smile:

What’s the best in practice in your opinion? For precision parts primarily so the 300mm/s doesn’t phase me as much as the 20 micron resolution does!

I’ve learned through my experiences that a pure H-bot needs high precision rails that refuse to give. CoreXY doesn’t suffer the racking problem, but it bugs the hell out of me with those crossing belts.

I much prefer the UM style gantry. The “crane gantry” (like this: http://moi3d.com/gallery/images/wdx1.jpg) is what MakerBot and the Solidoodle use and I dislike it because you’re carrying a bunch of weight with motor, etc. The UM gantry keeps all motors, and almost all weight off of the carriages so that it’s nimble, and plenty accurate.

You did not mention it, but money tends to be tight. Your having experience with UM makes you an easy prey for troubleshooting (I’ve done it myself without UM experience)

I guess you might want to troubleshoot the newer version better (though it may become expensive should you decide to buy one for yourself).

Problem with advice is that your expertise will later become a key point when things go wrong: “BTW, remember the printer your recommended … it is not behaving lately” :slight_smile:

The ultimaker is driven from both sides also correct?
X AND Y having 2 driven points either side of the centre of gravity is phenomenal, i’d really love to see one at work, it’s an engineering dream that x-y setup :slight_smile:

Mori Seiki CNC machines ($500,000 or so here) use “driven from centre of gravity” and “box-in-box” construction, and for the weight that is in the head of those machines (probably a ton, few hundred kilo at least I would imagine) they are unbelievably fast and accurate (more so than the ultimaker but… you’d want them to be for that price!) Does make me wonder though, why a lot of machine designers aren’t taking hints from existing machinery? My original Mendel X carriage had horizontally stacked rods, and was driven from outside of the rods??? That’s a bit of an engineering fail!

Ultimaker hasn’t just achieved a “lightweight head setup”… They’ve also designed arguably “the best motion system” for this type of CNC.

Been thinking of designing my own machine after seeing a big difference in x and y performance on my mendel… Haven’t come up with anything that beats the ultimaker system - I think they hit the nail on the head!