Hazer wrote:

Redbeer wrote:

I got it working reasonably well.
Overall, the entire process, moving slow and meticulously mind you, took me about 5 hours.

First of all, the z depth was off.  The extrusion was quite a bit more flat than it should have been.
The y belt alignment was off and at some points I could hear the clunking.  The x-axis was also off as the circles were long and thin.
Adjusting the x/y was the most fiddly.  It seems in the need to make this "as adjustable as possible", and apparently a great fear of over constraining anything, there's entirely too much play in the design IMHO. 
The directions to move the motor back and forth and the pulleys will align is not really true.  I had to hold the shaft at the rear in place on the left and right and then move the motor front to back to align the pulleys.
I used a straight edge to align the y motor pulleys at the end as doing it by eyeball seemed like it wouldn't be precise enough, and hard to see given it's position the assembly.
The heated bed was also not leveled as well as it could be from left to right (and inevitably from front to back after adjustment, so I had some problems with the part not sticking as well.

After getting all that done, I printed the sample part from Solidoodle reasonably well, there was a small flat spot at the front of the center hole and the holes at the flange base corners were a bit off center.

Then I printed a squirrel I downloaded from one of the sites listed here.  That printed pretty well from start to finish.

Then I tried the bunny model...and I had to readjust the machine.

Does anyone find that the machine goes out of adjustment after a single run?
I'm very sure I tightened everything properly, but does the process of running loosen the leveling and/or the zero for the z axis since the switch rubs on the nob for many of the first layers and the motion of the heated bed in x and y could conceivably throw it off level with the relatively loose wing nuts and the springs not being compressed evenly.

Thats because the bed is leveled by 3 1" long screws on springs. If your print hits anywhere during a print, the entire bed will shift. It can twist, slide, and whatever. Most people will tell you this a good thing as a nozzle crash would be so terrible (like the stepper is actually strong enough which it is not) so having this 'sloppyness' is better. Anyway, once your bed gets disturbed even slightly, your are going to go back to leveling and Z tab. Get used to it.

Now, once you get glass, an enclsoure, and a fan for your extruder then you will avoid having the issues that cause a nozzle crash in the first place, and have much less instances of adjusting your bed.

+1...I find I need to re-level after about every 3 runs; mostly, it's because I'm impatient to wait for my glass to cool and I end up prying and hitting the prints with a wooden hammer to get them off!

But you will get to the point where these once arduous tasks (leveling, extrusion modifiers, clogs, etc) become second nature and you'll be printing a ton.  I am very happy with the machine overall.  I do, however, agree with your initial post in that there can be a SIGNIFICANT improvement on SD's part to ensure that the unit functions out of the box...how about a CD or memory stick with the drivers?  I had to poke around on google and go to the Arduino site and get the drivers from there.  Or, how about running a 5-10 minute print of a standard calibration cube and packing it in the envelope?  Very frustrating.

The drivers have always been on our website.

Redbeer wrote:

I got it working reasonably well.
Overall, the entire process, moving slow and meticulously mind you, took me about 5 hours.

First of all, the z depth was off.  The extrusion was quite a bit more flat than it should have been.
The y belt alignment was off and at some points I could hear the clunking.  The x-axis was also off as the circles were long and thin.
Adjusting the x/y was the most fiddly.  It seems in the need to make this "as adjustable as possible", and apparently a great fear of over constraining anything, there's entirely too much play in the design IMHO. 
The directions to move the motor back and forth and the pulleys will align is not really true.  I had to hold the shaft at the rear in place on the left and right and then move the motor front to back to align the pulleys.
I used a straight edge to align the y motor pulleys at the end as doing it by eyeball seemed like it wouldn't be precise enough, and hard to see given it's position the assembly.
The heated bed was also not leveled as well as it could be from left to right (and inevitably from front to back after adjustment, so I had some problems with the part not sticking as well.

After getting all that done, I printed the sample part from Solidoodle reasonably well, there was a small flat spot at the front of the center hole and the holes at the flange base corners were a bit off center.

Then I printed a squirrel I downloaded from one of the sites listed here.  That printed pretty well from start to finish.

Then I tried the bunny model...and I had to readjust the machine.

Does anyone find that the machine goes out of adjustment after a single run?
I'm very sure I tightened everything properly, but does the process of running loosen the leveling and/or the zero for the z axis since the switch rubs on the nob for many of the first layers and the motion of the heated bed in x and y could conceivably throw it off level with the relatively loose wing nuts and the springs not being compressed evenly.

Thats because the bed is leveled by 3 1" long screws on springs. If your print hits anywhere during a print, the entire bed will shift. It can twist, slide, and whatever. Most people will tell you this a good thing as a nozzle crash would be so terrible (like the stepper is actually strong enough which it is not) so having this 'sloppyness' is better. Anyway, once your bed gets disturbed even slightly, your are going to go back to leveling and Z tab. Get used to it.

Now, once you get glass, an enclsoure, and a fan for your extruder then you will avoid having the issues that cause a nozzle crash in the first place, and have much less instances of adjusting your bed.

+1...I find I need to re-level after about every 3 runs; mostly, it's because I'm impatient to wait for my glass to cool and I end up prying and hitting the prints with a wooden hammer to get them off!

But you will get to the point where these once arduous tasks (leveling, extrusion modifiers, clogs, etc) become second nature and you'll be printing a ton.  I am very happy with the machine overall.  I do, however, agree with your initial post in that there can be a SIGNIFICANT improvement on SD's part to ensure that the unit functions out of the box...how about a CD or memory stick with the drivers?  I had to poke around on google and go to the Arduino site and get the drivers from there.  Or, how about running a 5-10 minute print of a standard calibration cube and packing it in the envelope?  Very frustrating.

I got it working reasonably well.
Overall, the entire process, moving slow and meticulously mind you, took me about 5 hours.

First of all, the z depth was off.  The extrusion was quite a bit more flat than it should have been.
The y belt alignment was off and at some points I could hear the clunking.  The x-axis was also off as the circles were long and thin.
Adjusting the x/y was the most fiddly.  It seems in the need to make this "as adjustable as possible", and apparently a great fear of over constraining anything, there's entirely too much play in the design IMHO. 
The directions to move the motor back and forth and the pulleys will align is not really true.  I had to hold the shaft at the rear in place on the left and right and then move the motor front to back to align the pulleys.
I used a straight edge to align the y motor pulleys at the end as doing it by eyeball seemed like it wouldn't be precise enough, and hard to see given it's position the assembly.
The heated bed was also not leveled as well as it could be from left to right (and inevitably from front to back after adjustment, so I had some problems with the part not sticking as well.

After getting all that done, I printed the sample part from Solidoodle reasonably well, there was a small flat spot at the front of the center hole and the holes at the flange base corners were a bit off center.

Then I printed a squirrel I downloaded from one of the sites listed here.  That printed pretty well from start to finish.

Then I tried the bunny model...and I had to readjust the machine.

Does anyone find that the machine goes out of adjustment after a single run?
I'm very sure I tightened everything properly, but does the process of running loosen the leveling and/or the zero for the z axis since the switch rubs on the nob for many of the first layers and the motion of the heated bed in x and y could conceivably throw it off level with the relatively loose wing nuts and the springs not being compressed evenly.

Thats because the bed is leveled by 3 1" long screws on springs. If your print hits anywhere during a print, the entire bed will shift. It can twist, slide, and whatever. Most people will tell you this a good thing as a nozzle crash would be so terrible (like the stepper is actually strong enough which it is not) so having this 'sloppyness' is better. Anyway, once your bed gets disturbed even slightly, your are going to go back to leveling and Z tab. Get used to it.

Now, once you get glass, an enclsoure, and a fan for your extruder then you will avoid having the issues that cause a nozzle crash in the first place, and have much less instances of adjusting your bed.

First of all, the z depth was off.  The extrusion was quite a bit more flat than it should have been.
The y belt alignment was off and at some points I could hear the clunking.  The x-axis was also off as the circles were long and thin.
Adjusting the x/y was the most fiddly.  It seems in the need to make this "as adjustable as possible", and apparently a great fear of over constraining anything, there's entirely too much play in the design IMHO. 
The directions to move the motor back and forth and the pulleys will align is not really true.  I had to hold the shaft at the rear in place on the left and right and then move the motor front to back to align the pulleys.
I used a straight edge to align the y motor pulleys at the end as doing it by eyeball seemed like it wouldn't be precise enough, and hard to see given it's position the assembly.
The heated bed was also not leveled as well as it could be from left to right (and inevitably from front to back after adjustment, so I had some problems with the part not sticking as well.

After getting all that done, I printed the sample part from Solidoodle reasonably well, there was a small flat spot at the front of the center hole and the holes at the flange base corners were a bit off center.

Then I printed a squirrel I downloaded from one of the sites listed here.  That printed pretty well from start to finish.

Then I tried the bunny model...and I had to readjust the machine.

Does anyone find that the machine goes out of adjustment after a single run?
I'm very sure I tightened everything properly, but does the process of running loosen the leveling and/or the zero for the z axis since the switch rubs on the nob for many of the first layers and the motion of the heated bed in x and y could conceivably throw it off level with the relatively loose wing nuts and the springs not being compressed evenly.

It's the weekend, so I'm going to attempt to tackle getting this thing calibrated.
Thanks for all the information.

Good on ya!

When you get the chance, come visit the hacks and mods section - many more fun-time weekends are ahead of you!

To optimize settings, I afterward went through the calibration process; the only significant adjustment being extruder calibration.  I print directly to the kapton, and rarely have sticking problems.  Twice I have used blue painter's tape to print a cat from Thingiverse, because the paws didn't have enough surface area to stick well.

I only have two minor problems that I feel I can solve myself:  slightly imperfect circles - I'm going to install the pillow block and bearing mod on the Y-axis rod...and overhangs tend to curl up somewhat, which I blame on slight overextruding.  I'm confident I'll have perfect printing shortly.

It may sound stupid, but it's happened to me just like this when I get a tangle in the filament.
Just a thought.

Like most people I have several inkjets and I know a ton of people that have them along with other types of printers.... but I can honestly say that whenever someone hands me a printout from an inkjet at least 50 percent of the time there are missing lines in the print.... obvious signs of guess what..... a clogged printhead!!!! so how long have they been around??? I had one of the first consumer color inkjets available from canon the pj1080a and that was quite a while back!!! so even with all this technology advancing in the last 20+ years they still can't make a printer that does not clog....?

anyways I just thought it was kind of funny

   On my second and third printers even though it was obvious that SD had done the standard test print of the spool holder that is printed on each and every printer that leaves their factory I had problems getting anything to stick to the build platform!!! so after a thorough cleaning with various solvents and such I finally got things to stick to the kapton tape... I figure it was mainly an environmental thing as humidity and temps were different than the first SD printer was set up... could also have been filament or a dozen other things including a different manufacturing run of kapton tape.

   My last printer had a wire come loose on the printhead and was causing intermittent problems within 10 minutes of powering it on... did I let this stop me? NO, I took a few minutes to troubleshoot it and found that either in packing or shipping one of the wires that use the IDC connections had been pulled partially out of it's crimp and therefore was not at 100 percent... so I repunched it and has been going strong ever since

   So from what I see this is a 'print out of the box' printer... sure it has some things I would design differently/better but then again I could say that about pretty much everything I buy... maybe I 'm just too picky... nah. A very good amount of the issues I see with people not being able to just open the box and print is software... and most of that is OS related problems, another big thing is faulty hardware... things break!!!  sometimes the broken part is caused by the user sometimes it is caused by freight companies handling and sometimes parts just fail because the design isn't so great... or sometimes things just go south for no apparent reason... that's just the nature of the beast with an emerging technology.

   One other thought on the subject of problems with the SD printers.... I also frequent a few other 3D printing forums and see the same sorts of posts about issues with several other well known brands in fact some of the posts are almost word for word the same... you would think they had an SD printer and were posting on the wrong forum!!! but no these issues are common to pretty much all of the different platforms of FDM printers in the consumer market.

   Anyways, just my ramblings on the matter

Mine shipped with an EEPROM value of 138, and I believe that is also the default in the official firmware. From what I have read from most reports on these forums, it seems people end up with values anywhere between 100-110. Seems pretty odd to me that the default as shipped is so far off the mark.

My guess is that perhaps at some point (on early units perhaps?) they had a different hobbed gear that was 20% smaller.  Since this would stay constant for any single machine and be taken into account into whatever fudge factor we entered into our slicing app after calibration, I can understand them not wanting to flash different settings into different machines.