Filament Loading Issue - Day 1 Newb

Push harder when you lead the filament into the extruder.  Like hard.  I beleive (And I have not seen it) that there are 2 'gears' that the filimant runs between, and you have to basically force them apart to get the filament in them.  I did allot of reading before I bought mine, and that's what one guy had said, is that he needed to really push down hard on the filament.  As far as the red, that is (I would assume) normal.  In the videos I watched some yellow extruded on the first print, presumably from the testing before the machine left the factory, but I suppose its plausible they switched to red.

Hope that helped.

I don't believe the filament can go down any further, I've really jammed it in there and feel as if I'm hitting the end.  I can see a silver metal gear through a hole that appears to be attached to the release arm.  I do not notice it move when loading, but it definitely moves when unloading - successfully.

I can actually see this gear spin when I manually feed it...

Have fun with the calibration.  For an example. run a calibration, do nothing (no adjustments) and then run it again...
After you do that you will see why many people on here think its useless.

As "new" owners of this hardware, we tend to expect something in the way of help in the documentation but there is so little of value there we might as well take a few hours and write our own (would be interesting to compare them after 30 days) - anyway, I had the same issue with pressing, squeezing, wondering, cussing, etc... all for nothing when you finally find out that there is a vertical metal lever (in line and just above the molded plastic "chassis carrier block" that holds the entire extruder head, etc.) and this lever is spring loaded (you can barely see the spring thru an opening just above the stepper motor that's mounted there.  If the system is cold it's a little harder to move but if you're doing an "install" routine, then carefully push that lever to the left (as you're standing in front of the entire box) and with your other hand push the filament down into the tubes/hole for it and the cogs will pickup the strand.  It took me almost three hours of putzing around (yes that's an engineering term) to find this, figure it out and find that it works quite easily.  About 5 minutes in a manual would more likely than not give anyone who was willing to read it the same information but sometimes we don't "read" as we should either.

One of the more often found warnings about 3D printers is that we're all getting onto this boat at its very early stages of life - it's not matured enough nor time enough so far for manufacturers to buckle down and get competitive so they all seem to limp along and do the bare minimum in terms of designing, building and documenting as many aspects of their product as they should - all because we're so damn eager to hand that money across the table and take this "new stuff" home with us.  This IS one of those things we'll all get past in time if we persist with some patience and also some "direct to the forehead" feedback to the manufacturers about short-sheeting us with products that are essentially about two to three cycles out of sync with what we should expect to see in a new product development.  We're all guilty of some portions of this picture but on days when the darn things works good, we're too excited to tell them that as well, and we should.

See if this helps with the filament loading issue and then be patient with yourself but persistent as well with playing the small role as "R&D support personnel" because that's what we're all doing - the pay is lousy but the rewards will be there in time.  Thanks.

Grab the Da Vinci calibration app for Android from the Amazon app store. It will save you a lot of time. I am not affiliated with the author but I happily recommend the app. I can calibrate the printer with 2-3 passes. Without the app its a lot of guesswork.

+1 for that to get you in the right "ballpark".
Then do a manual calibration straight after you get a pass to get better accuracy.

That saves the target the auto cal comes up with but that value is far from optimum. What they don't tell you is the correct bed level height across the bed should be about half of your starting layer height. Your starting layer should look squished. For example if you print at .3 then your layer should be .15. In most cases .15 is good for all layer heights unless you try going to .1 or lower. With stock firmware the best you can do is .2 which is the fine setting.

So you are looking for a gap between the bed and nozzle of about 1 sheet of paper. The stock auto cal makes this gap way to high. It usually makes it .25 or greater. The numbers that you see are actually supposed to be the height in hundreds of a mm. So a reported number of 256 would be .256, 325 would be .325. All of these values are too high and due to the way the measurement is taken it is near impossible to get below 200 without it failing.

Trust me when I say this and most seasoned users will vouch for this as well. No one uses the auto cal once they get a passing value stored. They all do manual calibrations with the spacer of their choice, feeler gauge, paper, business car ( a bit too thick) and other creative items.