Solidoodle Press, a rough start but I got her up and running!

My Solidoodle Press arrived this afternoon but I wasn't able to start fiddling with it until this evening.  The unboxing was what everyone has seen so far on Youtube, nothing unusual.  My extruder hotend was mostly clean, which seems to be the exception thus far.

Software installation went just fine on Windows 8.1 however 8.1 has security restrictions in place to not trust unsigned drivers and not even prompt the user to approve them.  Because of this there was no indication of a problem until you launched SoliPrint and it fails to find your printer.  I checked Device Manager and saw the flagged device, so I knew I needed a driver.  I quickly found the support article about installing drivers in 8.1 and the cringe worthy advice on disabling security features.  Fortunately immediately below that was the manual installation section which was mostly useless except for the link to the needed drivers.  You just download the drivers, right click on the excutable and select run as administrator then follow the prompts.  SoliPrint immediately finds the printer.

Homing the Press was easy the first time I did it.  Then for whatever reason I decided to do it again.  After completing the z-axis homing, the carriage drove all the way to the left on the x-axis but stopped just shy of engaging the track meant to retract the z-axis probe. For whatever reason the z-axis then raised up to bring the hot end close to the bed.  This resulted in the z-axis probe hanging over the left edge of the bed.  Naturally the printer then tried to align the hot end to the center of the bed but couldn't because the probe was stuck to the edge.  Horrible grinding ensued until I managed to open the Printer Config and lower the bed.  Fortunately the Printer Config appears to work even when the Press is in the middle of operations, I would leverage this knowledge later.

After retracting the z-axis probe and rehoming for a 3rd time, things went off without a hitch.  Well until the filament that was preinstalled in the extruder was fed.  Apparently the filament was cracked just above the extruder hole during shipping so when the drive gear sucked it in, it split and the extruder clogged with filament below the drive gear.  This sucked because the shield on the front of the extruder doesn't seem to come off and it makes everything inaccessible.  I had to jam a paper clip down past the drive get and force the broken filament through the hotend because when I tried ramming more filament the broken piece would conveniently hop out of the way.

After clearing the clog, I downloaded that iconic "cute octopus" stl from Thingaverse, loaded it up, set the layer height to .1 and hit print.  Things were going great until 4 or 5 layers in when some delamination started.  Remember the Printer Config still took inputs while the Press was printing, I raised the bed temp up 5 degrees.  I don't know if this made a difference but the delamination has subsided.  About 45 minutes in I noticed something that looked like layer separation, so I raised the hotend temp a few degrees and that seems to have cleared that up.

It's been 2 hrs and the part is approximately 75% complete and it looks great.  It was a rough start but things are running smoothly now.

Here's some photos I took, let me know if you want any more of anything in particular.
http://imgur.com/a/XuIdF