(Ahh....finally account is active and I can reply!)
Hey all. I read this entire thread, yes all 23 pages. Thanks for the look back at the progression of trials and sometimes errors. I'm right there with you. Below is a (far too) long retelling of my tales of woe. To sum it up: if your PEI sheets make you wonder if they didn't ship you some other material, you might have molding-release remaining on the material. Well, at least that's what it seemed like.
As of today, I can report that I FINALLY am printing good ABS parts. It's been a strange and long road since late October. The first print was "okay" in the sense that it was small and seemed to stay together. And then I tried designing my own stuff. After all, that's why I got it. Failure, failure, failure. It's felt like every significant problem that people encountered, I came across too. Chief among them, of course: delamination at height, and bed adhesion.
So far I'd tried hairspray (no thanks, for lots of reasons including it reminds me of my long-ago-dead grandma, so that's weird), glue-stick (70% qualified success), and the green tape in 12" squares (great practice for squeegee skills!).
And then I stumbled on this thread, knowing that surely by now someone had figured this out. Okay, so miracle material, etc. I'm totally thinking this is an excellent thing. I didn't have the sourcing issues others (esp. internationally) have had. I got 4 pieces of the 1-foot square 30-mil sheets. Why four? 'Cause I always mess up the first time

. And then it will typically take another one before I figure out what to never do, and then because that third one will last forever, and when I finally do need to replace it, it won't be available anymore. Been there too many times.
In addition to the nice amber-colored material, I got the 1/2" tape...except in my unknowningness, I got the 457 (50 micron) instead of the 458 (130 micron). Yeah, seriously. It's less than half the thickness, it was here, so I gave it a go.
With all the talk about copper heat spreaders and such, I snickered in my self-satisfaction that I had multiple tubes of something that would DEFINITELY improve the thermal coupling between glass bed and PEI sheet: heatsink compound. Not the epoxy, but the grease. I didn't seem to dissolve the adhesive, but it didn't adhere the PEI to the bed, so internal stresses made it bow creatively in the middle as it heated. Okay, so let's start simple 'cause that's going to be a mess to fix, and it does seem to stay flat enough at lower temps. So, I tried a couple HIPS and ABS prints, 0.35 nozzle, 0.2x thick. Let's just say that the only reason the threads fused together was because they just happened to be sitting in the right place. There was literally ZERO adhesion. Yes, lots of cleaning with acetone, alcohol, Windex and Dawn (not in that order, of course!).
The it hit me: ah, you dummy, you got the SMOOTH side up! Ewe....scraping all grease off? Ick. Sigh...okay....and 20 minutes and several solvent washings of the borosilicate-glass, and I was ready to go. But this time, let's skip the tape and goop and see if we can just get something...ANYTHING...to actually stick. Because let's face it: if I'm extruding a line that measures between 0.21 and 0.23 mm around the skirt first layer (for a setting of 0.22mm first-layer height), to me that's a flat-enough bed. And while the upper layers might pull off the lower layers, surely that first layer has to show SOME adhesion, right? I mean seriously...it was literally just SITTING on the bed surface. Grabbed a bunch of those spring-steel binder clips (who doesn't have hundreds of those sitting around?) and held down the PEI, smooth surface to the glass. That seemed like it would work well too, since the very slight "cupping" of the sheet was in that direction. Down it went and up went the bed temperature, and then the extruding....
And nothing. Nada, no adhesion at all. And let's be clear here: this whole mounting and reseating is done with 8-mill nitrile gloves, twice washed with dawn even before I start working with the materials. Everything got cleaned with soap-and-water, then acetone, then alcohol. This is some clean material when I'm done with it. And yet....nothing.
Okay, yes, the matte side is up now. Hmm....okay, fine, I'll go scratch it a little with some 1500-2000 grit (over the course of the thread that recommendation has "evolved"

). I have the MicroMesh sponges, so used the tan one first, their 2500. Which, given that there exists a chart on the package between their grits and standard grits, well, to me that means 2500 ain't 2500, right? Okay, so I'll go easy.
Nice quick rub, corner-to-corner to create a good diamond pattern and clean with acetone and alcohol, can barely see it. And.....nothing. Seriously. Nothing? Grrr. Argh.
Okay, so let's start eliminating things: I've been using first-use car-detailing wipes, Kimberly-Clark WyPall L-40's. Maybe they have some treatment on them to prevent scratching? Okay, go to known-clean microfiber. And....no change.
Fine....I'll tie the bed down fully with the tape. Sorry, Charlie, but you're first-sheet, I can't trust you're not somehow contaminated, so you get a permanent crease and trip to the garbage can

. On to sheet two. Now you're starting to see why I bought four!
For the new sheet, I invested the 24 feet of 0.5" tape (Yeah, I got several rolls) with ~1mm spaces between then. Putting them right next to each other caused too much problems with the new layer sticking to the very edge of the previous strip. I was able to position it more easily when I intentionally did not let them touch. Then nice new cleaned sheet put down, roughed up, cleaned again, and onto the machine. There were definitely tiny air-bubbles, but the surface held great, even at 110C for a couple cycles.
Based on the thread, it's gonna be great....except it STILL didn't work. ZERO bed adhesion. Okay, check line heights. Perfect, spot on 220C head, 102C bed (measured, +/- 4-5C across pretty much the entire bed, even without a spreader) 0.35 nozzle, 0.22 line height, 0.25 base line width, 120% first-layer width, well-tuned feed rate, and slow linear rate of like 35 mm/s, sealed enclosure with top at 38C and bottom at 32C, so no drafts and good temsp. Even on the green stuff, with ABS juice (don't drink this at home!) and even the Purple Liberation Arm's glue sticks, there was at least SOME adhesion, even if in only a small area. This? Nothing. Measure the strands, and they were exact. Well okay, they DID vary by as much as 0.02mm, which really....that's close enough, right? I mean, flattening out that last tiny bit...that's a huge part of the first layer's job. If that doesn't go down smooth, often the part is doomed from over-extrusion anyway. But, I digress...still zero adhesion. Grrr...arrgh more. But, it's late and I should be in bed....
Then, late that night, it dawns on me. This is cast material, isn't it? They don't extrude it in those 30-mil sheets, and given the brittleness (at cutting), I'm pretty sure they don't skive it either. Which means that the moment before this stuff hardens, it's in what is effectively a "mold". And what do you do with molds? You coat them in mold-release compound, don't you? Yeah...and so it dawned on me. There might very well be "more than people who've been successful saw". Not defective, per se, but somehow mine were somewhere in the production run where they were liberally coated with the stuff.
Next morning I got out a magnifier, and looked closely at that textured side. Sure enough, the surface was clearly "buffered" (yeah, not the correct term) by some coating that made the texture itself very shiny and smooth. I could see "into" the texture. Whereas a good fine-tooth surface needed for adhesion shouldn't have a passivated (?) surface, it should have both the "coarse" rated set of scratches, but also many more "higher-frequency" smaller scratches. In short, the surface needed to have a more "milky" appearance, and less glossy. So out came the tan and black MicroMesh sanding sponges, and a little more pressure was there so I could see the diagonal pattern just slightly.
So then I did something I think I regret...maybe. I decided "oh yeah!?!?! This stuff thinks acetone is the worst I've got? Ha!" So downstairs to the bicycle-maintenance area for some destroys-literally-everything CRC brake cleaner. Mean nasty angry stuff. The can says it all: "cannot be made non-poisonous". Onto a cloth it goes, onto the bed surface. Wow...interesting...oh dear Lord what a smell! Note to self: completely cool bed first! Ventilation. Cannot be made non-poisonous. No, Really.
And then I started to notice a change. As I wiped with the brake cleaner, I was in horror: it made the surface look like I'd just sprayed WD-40 or some other light OIL on it. Oh no, did I just ruin sheet #2? Calm down...clean like normal...dawn, then acetone, then alcohol...it will all be okay. Say it again.....and breathe....
(Side note: when progressively sanding, I've noticed that the pitch-distribution of the scritch-scritch sound made by the sandpaper changes in a predictable way as the rated surface smoothness is approached. This is also true for light. A surface that is reflecting only a few wavelengths because the surface texture/irregularities/scratches only exists at a limited number of sizes/frequencies, will have more saturated individual colors. A surface with a wide-distribution of scratch sizes/frequencies will appear more "white" or milky. It's that quality of a surface being smoothed as opposed to already perfectly smooth that made me realize what was going on).
Sure enough, as the alcohol started to dry, a REAL surface started to show itself. The amber color came through, but there was this clearly toothed surface. Wow....it was flat, perfect, just begging to be printed on. So, I'll just warm up the bed and extruder....and whoa! What the heck? Oh lovely...something is attacking the adhesive and it's releasing the PEI sheet. Just where did I put the clips? So, what's odd is that either the alcohol, acetone or brake cleaner did it. They were all on cloths, none of them got to the edge. Oh, no...wait...remember that thing where the sheet got all transparent....I wonder if one of the gazillion "petroleum distillates" they had on the label made it through the plastic, or maybe the fumes were enough? In any event, of the 12" square, about 2" on each side, all around, had bowed up about 5mm. Don't care. Pin that thing down with the spring clips...the center's fine and still atched, and I want to see this thing work!
Yeah, so how did it go? PERFECTLY. No, seriously. I've had this printer since October 12th. Until yesterday morning, it has printed effectively zero good parts of my own design because of materials, profiles that squirt too much filament, but primarily because of insufficient bed adhesion and layer separation at height. One part of a product I hope to manufacture on a small scale is six inches tall, about 1/2" thick, and over a foot long (diagonally on the Taz4 square bed, duh!). I suffered mightily with making even test sections of it. Constantly battling bed adhesion and delamination issues. Just like so many before me.
But now, once I got the surface right, it's been dialed in perfect. Seriously. My first part was 165x175x220mm and it had never made it beyond 10mm tall before either peeling or breaking. This one was made completely perfectly with no surface globulation, no lift-off errors, no surface irregulatiries, thick and thin walls. Which is a good thing, because this darned 10-hour print is one piece of a 4-piece thing that I need precisely ONE of...starting this job 20 times to get it right was making me wonder if I shouldn't just machine the thing out of a block of Unobtainium. But that part finished perfectly. And the second part of that set is now printing...also with only one inconsequential think I didn't like.
Funny how sometimes when you're trying to dial in a new machine, and you don't quite know exactly where some painful problem is coming for. As you go through all the things that could be a problem, and successively eliminate each one, when you finally do get to the real source of the problem, so many other areas were upgraded and calibrated during the process that it's rock solid when the problem is finally found.
And for me, that is exactly what happened:
-- I thought it was bed leveling, so with a lot of skirts and caliper measurements, I got it dialed in to +/- 0.01mm.
-- I was in horror watching the nozzle thunk into other parts as it travelled: tell Slicr to stop that with some vertical lift
-- I watched as the first couple layers made a huge mess on the perimeters due to over-extrusion: fixed that, calibrated head.
-- Big part (165 x 175 x 220mm) in 0.35/0.22-0.25 takes way too long: switched to 0.5mm nozzle and 0.4mm width. Halved it.
-- first layer settings just plain wrong. fixed 'em.
-- X-axis co-linearity with bed was off slightly. fixed that
-- The heavily-nailed together 2x sheets of 5/8 CDX plywood underneath the printer apparently CAN bow when heated, leaving the rear pair of feet up in the air! D'oh. Replaced with more-proper butcher-block.
-- Drafts bad...build schweet enclosure while simultaneously taking over the guest-bedroom closet

.
-- Heat good...trap heat and add active chamber warm-up.
-- Vibration damping good...be like the wind and accept all the energy using a vibration-isolation platform. Yeah, it made a HUGE difference in the quality of perimeters near sharp corners. The momentum of the moving head goes through the frame, into the platform and the foam underneath, so there's almost no energy sent into flexing the printer frame. I'll post some things about that.
So, once I finally go a good surface, with everything else having been checked multiple times and progressively dialed in, the prints are now picture perfect. Maybe I'll even post some

. But now, up to check on the second print. 165x175x160mm this time, a hollow shroud.
Oh...and by the way, thanks go to whoever all wrote SCad. Loving that thing! I'm sort of a geometrical constructionist kinda-guy, after all
Cheers, hope the above all made sense. Thanks so much for the extensive history.