New user configuration questions

[Joymaker]

I tried my first serious print yesterday. Replicator G. comes preconfigured for ABS printing, I tried cloning my profile "Replicator 2 slicing defaults" and modifying to suit PLA printing. Several problems happened:

1. It is determined to the plate to 110°C before printing the model. I really don't need the plate heated at all, I've done plenty of PLA printing on another printer without heating the plate at all. Even if I do want to heat it, I certainly don't want it that warm, it makes things messy. Where do I go to change or turn off the heated plate setting?? It seems to be really well hidden. I actually tried editing start.gcode to remove the plate heating command, but even that didn't seem to work.

2. Cloning the profile had another problem: it randomly turned on skeinlayer. This problem has been reported for Windows, but it turns out to be a problem on the Mac. Wasted many precious minutes while I sat there waiting for it to proceed, not understanding that it was waiting for me to close skeinlayer !! (

3. The cloned profile, when put to use, actually printed nothing! It set up the printer, heated things,, move things around, and then quit without making 1 cubic millimeter of anything. I had made some changes. I turned off Raft, because it was a large object with a big flat base and I saw no need for any raft for any reason. Or support. Is this fatal? Does this module have to be turned on, no matter what?

Are there any other configuration mistakes that might make Skeinforge omit the content gcode, even after spending five minutes generating it?

I finally succeeded by backing off to the original profile and tolerating 110°.

[3DCAKE]

Joy,

I'm two months into using the FFCP, I have the stock platform not glass, not yet. You need to turn the platform heat off for PLA, you do that in the Gcode after you have created it. After creating the Gcode click on the Gcode tab that appears next to the Model tab. You want to look for 'M109 S0 T0 (set HBP temperature)' in the code, should be in the first 10 or so lines and it will show 110 not 0. Manually change it to 0. You'll need to tack up the surface so the model sticks and use the raft to help keep it down. Methods for tacking up the surface include hairspray or creating a slurry from acetone and some abs filament. I have yet to make the slurry but have used hair spray, be sure to use aerosol, the pump stuff never seems to be sticky enough. If you edited the gcode from the file it saved you would need to reload that code before you start the build.

Hope this helps

~3C

[Joymaker]

I actually did figure out the trick about editing the G code. I'm rather shocked that I had to go under the hood in that way for a setting that seems so basic and so obvious. I'm surprised it isn't in the quickie panel that first appears when I go to generate gcode, right underneath the print temperature setting. Why not??

I haven't tried spraying anything yet, I may do that. Based on someone else's posted advice, I have tried printing with a heated bed temperature of 70 – 75° C, and this actually helps considerably (though not perfectly) with the curling corner problem on large flat objects. I'm avoiding raft, it doesn't come off the printed object cleanly at all!