Not as advertised. (Page 2 of 2)

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.