Noob seeks advice from veterans...

[abomb60]

Do yourself a huge favor and load new firmware on your Da Vinci (it is actually pretty easy). I was getting decent prints with mine stock but loading Repetier firmware and getting rid of the horrific stock XYZWare made a huge difference. My advice is to flash it and use better printing software (Repetier, Mattercontrol, etc). Also look online and get some test print files and print them until they are perfect. The Da Vinci 1.0 is a capable little printer if you know how to tweak it and get it to work well. After firmware and hotend upgrade (E3D V6) I am getting awesome results with everything from PLA to Ninjaflex. Also I've found with mine that these things love to screw up the print bed calibration. If I even think about scraping something off the print bed with too much force it gets out of whack. Calibrate the bed often. I've been using 0.05 and 0.10 feeler gauges with the manual leveling feature in Repetier firmware and it works well (E3D V6 hotend mod removes the autoleveling probe). I use Mattercontrol so after I manually calibrate to 0.05mm with the feeler gauges at all 3 points I run Mattercontrols auto bed leveling and that's been working well. Almost all of my printing issues have been resolved by leveling the bed. Just remember to adjust your Z offset once the bed is leveled.