Cura or Lulzbot Does not Connect with a particular model

I have a model. Fairly complex gear sort of thing. It loads into Cura fine. I scale it and rotate it. Takes a little longer than usual, but it loads and positions fine. But with the Taz 6 hooked up, it never calculates the time and weight, and it never lights up the Control button. It is well within the size limitation, only about 4x4x4. When I change to a different model, everything works fine. It just seems to be this one model. What could be wrong?

I recreated the model from scratch and regenerated the stl, and that has resolved the issue. It is now printing.

It might not have been manifold, which would cause issues on programs that can’t account for it or have built-in tools to fix it. I don’t know what you are using for designing, but see if there is a tool for it to see if its a valid stl, or the model is manifold. I mostly use 3D Studio Max (used to be a 3d animator in another life so I know it well) and it has tools to check and will highlight problem areas. I believe Bl3nder does as well. There are probably standalone freeware apps but I try to keep my toolkit small.

I am using Geomagic Design. The model passed through the analysis tools without error, and the new model was identical to the original – except… that there were a couple of reference planes in the original that had become disassociated with the geometry during earlier iterations. I left these out of the clean version. Not sure why that would cause an issue with Cura, but apparently it does.

Strange, that actually doesn’t sound manifold so I’m surprised it passed some sort of checker. Detached geometry, especially faces/planes (ie 2D/no depth) confuse a lot of slicers. Sounds like you removed them and it worked.