Not as advertised. (Page 1 of 2)

I feel ya. And I will reply before all the "you should have expected this" come in.

First, I agree. "Out o the box" is a load of crap. I have no idea if any of the other sub-$1000 machines can claim this truthfully either. As a fellow engineer, I do know that every piece of equipment I have ever purchased usually comes with some sort of calibration (especially the nature of this particular field). I do not believe that having to calibrate a 3D printer out of the box is excessive or demanding, and in my experience with other equipment (PCB routers and other such prototyping equipment from trusted companies) it is a good way to learn your machine before expecting it to perform flawlessly with a start button. Please do not mistake my words, I fully agree with your point of view. I am only adding what should be expected next.

So if we were to come to that conclusion that calibration is a necessity, where is our documentation? Paper? Nope. PDF? Nope. Oh, some pages on their website. How many models do they have? Did they give you any paperwork to tell you what machine you have? Is your nozzle 0.4 or 0.35? Which firmware do you have? This is another failing. On top of that, your best  bet is to go to these forums and ask for help. But now the problems can get worse, as the most experienced people do not have the latest hardware revisions. Actually, the best people on these forums will recommend to 'upgrade' and alter everything about your machine to fix all the problems. Their experience is immeasurably valuable, yet this is also a far cry from where we started which was "I just wanted to buy and print".

I can tell you that thier are two possible fixes to your Y shifting issue: Extrusion calibration or stepper current adjustment. If you have not performed all of the calibrations to make sure your extrusion is correct, you may be over-extruding causing your nozzle to bump into plastic that is building up over the layer hieght you are working with. Or, your stepper driver is not adjusted correctly for the torque of your motor and the stepper is skipping steps due to that. You will have to first calibrate your extrusion before adjusting current. The crappy part is that the different motherboards require different adjusting of the stepper drivers and hence there is another opportunity for someone to use the wrong guides/information that is quite literally poorly organize (should I use SD main website? Ask on these forums and probably get flamed for not searching? Or maybe the 2 separate Wikis that concentrate on only one machine version or the other, without expressiing which  version they are describing?).

Conclusion:
-rarely out of box printing.
-no included documentation.
-multiple sources of varied information poorly organized.

So, to get on with helping:

1. Find out which motherboard you have. Since you said your machine was $1K, I will assume the new SD4 that has built-in enclosure and a printrboard REV E electronics.
2. Follow the wiki here for calibrating EVERYTHING: http://wiki.solidoodle.com/solidoodle-1. Dont skip stuff. Your an engineer, you know better.
3. Calibrate your steps/mm for your extruder physically. Software wont work well unless you nail this down.
4. Level your bed.
5. Get your Z height set.
6. Calibrate your extrusion width by printing single walled object.
7. Adjust your Y stepper driver if it is still shifting.
8. Calibrate your circles using the belt calibration guide.

That is the steps that should be advertised for proper setup of any printer. Period. Even if there is a printer that comes well adjusted out of the box, I would still advise to check all of these things.

Sorry I was under the impression this forum was official or at least somewhat so, given that I was linked here directly by the Solidoodle site as part of clicking through their Tech Support link.

Thank you to Hazer for the information.
I'll certainly perform all the calibrations, but it makes me regret purchasing the more expensive version 4, given that the case work (which I do want to enclose the mess), makes it hard to fiddle with in many ways.

As one of the guys that Hazer referred to (usually recommend mods and upgrades).  I agree with you 100% about it not being ready to print "out of the box".  That being said I have now witnessed two SD printers that actually did print right out of the box. 
I would suggest as a time saver that you just take the time to remove the enclosure until you get through the calibration phase of things.  It might be a pain but it will be worth it in the end. 
I think it is important to acknowledge how much these things get banged around during shipping.

Just remember even though SD has dropped the ball with their documentation and lack any real instructions.
The users here on the forum are glad to help you with any problems you encounter. 
All you have to do is ask.

Since this is a brand new printer that is skipping on Y, there is one thing to try before the others that might work.  Sometimes during shipping it get bumped a little out of alignment just enough to make it prone to jamming.  Try hitting the Motors Off button or simply shutting off power, then slide the extruder forward and back by hand a few times.  Sometimes this is enough to make it settle in.  If that doesn't work, then have a look at stepper current and extrusion. 

If it is over extruding enough to snag the nozzle, you will see a rough surface and nozzle tracks through the plastic.

I can tell you from my personal experience, my machine was far from calibrated. I also had the 'shadow' of the test piece on my kapton. I can also tell you my belts were so damn loose and the extrusion steps/mm so far off there was no way they could have printed that out without some major tweaking of slicer and flowrate.

Now, when I was shopping around, I had seen quite a few reviews of how the earlier shipments came with broken printed parts. Quite a few of them were Y brackets for the idlers. So when my unit came with floppy belts, I was curious. I have had the suspicion that at some point Solidoodle may have been purposely loosening belts before shipment to guarantee less broken parts during shipping. I am also befuddled as to why there are so many reports of the steps/mm being so far off. 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.

Another thing to state is that when Solidoodle was first in the game, I was under the impression that most other companies of the time were selling unassembled kits. So, in those terms, the Solidoodle is "out of the box" printing.

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.

The odd thing is that this was true for the Solidoodle 1.  It had a gearbox stepper and the extruder steps/mm was in the 700 range.  When I first did the steps/mm calibration, the default was 20% too much.  The steps/mm had to be different for the SD2 since there is no gearbox, and I was baffled when I found that they had calculated the new default to a number that was still 20% too much.  I think they must have been using some kind of calculation to reach that number, which was wrong, rather than empirical measurement.

Funny you should mention inkjet printers gtennefoss

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

Second run, it ran through seemingly good passes for about 3 minutes, then after about 10 minutes it was back printing half a part or more off of the center in the direction from front to back.

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

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

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.