First, your going to have a tough time with ABS without a heated bed. I hope you plan to buy some PLA filament soon, because you will get frustrated real quick until you get yourself a heated bed.

Second, once you get the PLA you need to calibrate EVERYTHING. Do not think you can print out-of-the-box. You will end up with plastic monstrosities, and quite possibly a clogged head. Now, follow this guide here: http://wiki.solidoodle.com/

You will want to calibrate in this order:

1. Level your bed. Using Repetier and manual mode, move the head around (not heated and nothing coming out of the nozzle) and use a business card to level the bed. A good trick is to level the front screws first, followed by the one back screw last.

2. Set Z screw height. With the bed leveled using a business card done, then set your fist layer height more precisely. This is the Z scrw calibration. Watch the videos showing how this is best done. Without this, many problems occur during a print. You want the first layer to squish just enough to stick, without squishing too much so that it creates ridges that the nozzle bumps on it.

3. Extruder calibration. You need to measure a 100mm length of filament and then tell the machine to extrude 100mm and measure the difference. Once you know the difference, you can use Repetier Host to change the EEPROM value for Extruder Steps per MM. Without doing this, you will have problems with the extruder pushing out too much or not enough filament.

4. 0.42 wall test. Once you have adjusted the extruder steps/mm, then you need to fine tune it based upon the filmament you are using. Print a 10mm cube (as in the videos/tutorials) and measure the wall thickness. This will help give you a number to enter into the extrusion multiplier in Repetier. Without doing this, you could have gaps between your outer perimeters and your infill, or over extrusion which basically pushes too much plastic and it creates ridges that the nozzle keeps coliding with every layer.

5. X-Y belt tensioning and circle calibration. It is a little more tricky, but it needs to be done. Otherwise, every corner of every print will lokk funky, not just circles.

From my experience, its not worth printing anything until these calibrations are done. Hell, I keep re-doing them regularly and I have only had my printer for 3 months. I redo the Z screw every time I have a bad print. I level the bed weekly. I perform the extrusion multiplier with every spool of filament. And I grease the rods and check X-Y belt tension monthly. My point is, if you want to see bare minimum adequate parts printed, get used to doing all of these calibrations. You will benefit from a $15 set of digital calipers (wall test) and feeler gauges (Z height).

All of this information is posted and easily available, but for some reason it always seems understated. The unit ships with no documentation. The website gives you the information and the links, but it feels like they are telling you you can just do the 'quick start' method and expect results, which is almost never true. IMO, these calibration steps are necessary before ever trying to print even the simplest of shapes. In my experience, most machines have a 'Start up and calibration' to them, and it feels like when it comes to the Solidoodle it is highly understated. And the best part is, once these steps are done, you get very good results from the machine.

Also it looks like the printer isn't sending enough filament out?

Make sure to calibrate it.  I had this problem when I had it way off.

Also the z distance and bed leveling is extremely important, so do make sure to do that.

The SD base model(no bed heat) is primarily a pla printer, not saying it can't use abs but it takes some doing...

I'm using a Solidoodle 2 non-pro (so acrylic bed, not heated). I'm using the filament that it shipped with (which I presume is ABS).

I'm running Repetier-Host with Slic3r on a Mac. I've followed tutorials to get my initial configuration done -- hopefully correctly!

I've had three major problems with my first attempts at prints, and would love some words of wisdom to guide me:

1. When the extruder is heated up to 195 degrees, it starts leaking plastic. So when the print starts, there's already a long thread that gets attached and tangled up in the print. I've managed to mitigate this by continually cutting off the excess plastic, until the extruder actually moves (about 10-15 sec after I press Run Job in Repetier) but it's still not foolproof.

Is this normal? It doesn't seem normal. I have no idea how to fix this -- lower extruder temperature??

2. The print isn't solid -- it looks like a mesh.
It would appear that the extruder head is too high -- according to wiki.solidoodle.com/first-layers-setting-the-z-offset
So I'm going to try adjusting that during the next print attempt.

3. The edges of the object curled up while printing, and the object came loose (and stuck to the extruder head) before it finished printing.
I tried hairspray on the acrylic base but that just made it worse.

Is it possible that fixing the Z-index could solve all three of my issues?

Images attached of my best attempt so far.