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Hurray, happy day, I finally got the calibration cube to print! Okay, it failed of course, but I'm still excited to at least see something 3D! My issue is that I don't have the experience yet to know what problem causes what symptom in the print. That's what I'm hoping you guys can help with.

Mainly the High (and hopefully Medium) issues are what I'm most needing help with.
I've listed everything tho, just in case one issue is related to another.
(Note: When I'm referring to "axis" below that's like the rostock z axis, not the cartesian z axis.)

High priority:
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1) The corner post between the z-x axes is severely deformed. (See pic) Strangely the solid corner directly below it looks perfect.
Also, the corner post between the y-z axes is acceptable but has a few pinholes, yet both the posts between the x-y axes are gorgeous as can be! Medium priority:
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2) The side facing the X axis was slightly concaved in. This may be a result of my build platform issue below or it may mean something. I don't know.

3) In-fill goes all the way to the outside wall, but does not touch the inside wall. I'm not sure how to adjust that.

4) The print did pretty well, but when it got to the columns everything rotated counter-clockwise slightly -- about 0.25mm (estimating). The top solid area seemed to rotate back. Is it maybe supposed to look like this or something?

Low priority:
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5) Hot end jammed when the print reached the top solid layer. I just need to take it apart and see what happened.

6) I'm having trouble getting prints to stick. I've tried varying temperatures, de-greasing, sanding the glass, adjusting nozzle height. Finally painters tape helped get me this far. I just need to work out my system better.

7) The corners of the print seem to be curled up. Probably due to the last item?

8) Finally, there are a few artifacts between the posts. I probably just need to fiddle with retraction setting or whatever it's called.

On the messed up tower, my best guess is that the printer is slipping on retract/resume (prime/suck), easy way to determine is disable it and see if it still happens.
Probably what happens is after the retract/resume you get filament starvation leading to the effect you see as the layer progresses the filament starts feeding again and you get reasonable towers.

I would strongly recommend you do calibration with retract/resume disabled, it can cause all sorts of issues with the agressive speeds and lengths required by Bowden tubes (and Steve's extruder makes it hard to see them), once you have decent prints minus the stringing print some calibration parts to set up retract/resume, at least then you know what the cause of any new issues is.

I did as directed and overall it did a lot better!
Items 2 and 4 are still an issue, but most of the rest were pretty well solved.

Of course, without any retraction the space in between the towers is a ghastly mess. Is there any tutorial or something that describes how to get this feature set up so it works right??

(Also I solved my jamming and edge curling problems but I still haven't found the right magic to make the prints stick reliably.)

After some digging around, the best I found for retract calibration was this:
http://richrap.blogspot.com/2012/01/sli ... s-and.html

And that helped a lot. It got me back the same error-less cal cube only with maybe 40% less stringies. Now I feel like I have something to work with at least.

Now my biggest problem is I am noticing that the object seems to deform a lot as it is being printed. The whole shape really bends around a lot with the motion of the print head! Like I tried mini squirrel and he did great as long as he was one piece but as soon as the head/tail split the print head was dragging plastic between them until all there was left was a blob.

Is it possible that the lower layers are not cooling enough before the next plastic is added? If so, how do I fix that??

(P.S. My sticking problem was solved by a trick I saw online somewhere where you dissolve ABS scraps in acetone and spread that on the glass before printing.)

TheHeadlessSourceMan wrote:After some digging around, the best I found for retract calibration was this:
http://richrap.blogspot.com/2012/01/sli ... s-and.html

And that helped a lot. It got me back the same error-less cal cube only with maybe 40% less stringies. Now I feel like I have something to work with at least.

Now my biggest problem is I am noticing that the object seems to deform a lot as it is being printed. The whole shape really bends around a lot with the motion of the print head! Like I tried mini squirrel and he did great as long as he was one piece but as soon as the head/tail split the print head was dragging plastic between them until all there was left was a blob.

Is it possible that the lower layers are not cooling enough before the next plastic is added? If so, how do I fix that??

(P.S. My sticking problem was solved by a trick I saw online somewhere where you dissolve ABS scraps in acetone and spread that on the glass before printing.)

Probably insufficient cooling, printing slightly too hot and probably extruding too much filament.
I recommend calibrating with a single wall cube followed by 100% filled cube, I wrote it up in the rostock forum somewhere.

I found a the block you mentioned and some excellent calibration instructions here on thingiverse. I've tweaked it from complete garbage to fairly nice, so I'm very pleased, but I have a some new questions concerning my settings.

1) I've been getting great improvement setting the filament diameter accurately and fiddling the extrusion multiplier. The thing is, I heard somewhere that you shouldn't expect to tweak the multiplier more than +/- 10% I'm already down to 80% and measuring the box thickness I could use even more. Is that kosher or... ?

2) I've been able to get the box size correct, but I've had to change the scale factors in the repetier object placement tab to do it. I don't think that's the right place to be doing that. I'm pretty sure that's for changing scaling for an individual print, not for calibrating. Where do I adjust this in slic3r for calibrating?


And these next two are just some annoyances...

3) I was hoping to streamline my startup sequence by having everything heating and homing simultaneously: The trouble is when I slice it automatically adds this stuff before my custom code, effectively undoing what I was trying to accomplish Where is this coming from and can I make it stop doing it?

4) I'd like to enable "park after job kill" in repetier just so the print head gets out of my way when I cancel out. The problem (I think) is that its still in relative positioning mode from the print so if I kill the job it slams the motors into the roof! Is there a way to make it switch to the correct mode before parking so I can use the feature without damaging my printer?

1) There are several inter-related parameters to make these adjustments. What do you have extrusion widths set to in Print Settings->Advanced? These can be manipulated too.

2) Size calibration should really be done in firmware. Sounds like you have a steps per mm calibration issue.

3) Slic3r will do that. I simply get the bed and hot end started heating up manually in my host. Then it will be ready to go. Those are taken from the Filament Settings->Filament tab. I think this is baked into Slic3r.

4) hmm, I don't seem to have this problem. Have to think about this one.

2) This confuses me. I tried changing that, but now the height is wrong.

P.S. Item 3 seems to be fixed in the latest slic3r.