Just got my Flashforge Creator Dual and here are my first prints

[Dargonfly]

Ok, prints keep getting worse and worse,
Layers looked like they were 'woven' instead of printed, much warping, parts coming lose 1/2 through the print, AND plastic sticking to the nozzle instead of the build plate/part..

so I'm going to reset everything as much as possible:
- Ordered some material for a good build surface which allows the part to stick
- In the meanwhile going to clean the extruder/nozzle as much as possible
- Going to to have to do some leveling again offcourse and then I'll print a fan duct for controlled cooling of the printed material
- As soon as the fan duct is on there I'll return to trying to print these spheres, which will hopefully go in one go then...

[Dargonfly]

So problem one was solved; I can now get materials to stick properly to the bed.
Now I want to print PLA without warping; so I printed this fan-duct:



Look at that smooth bottom!! Rest of the surface was perfect too!
After that I got some 'clicking' when changing filament,, but this was not hearable during extrusion (though I did think I saw some variation in thickness of the extrusion....)



On this part you see a lot of 'dots' and somewhat 'burned' particles... I think this has something to do with the clicking, so I stopped using this extruder, until I have cleaned it. If there could be any other cause for this than rubbish in the extruder please let me know!

And here you can see the fan duct in action;


I didn't have enough fate in 'just' the air duct on the extruders, because the energy needs to 'move' away to some other place inside the room. So I also added two 230-240[mm] fans on both sides, both blowing to the left creating a air duct.
I've watched the temp of the heat bed during a print and it remained between 23-27 degrees Celcius during the entire print! (Without the fan it would rise to 40 degrees Celcius and gradually drop as the extruder got further away from the build plate.)
This variation in temp is probably also due to the 'flow' with probably affects the readout device a lot, because most of the times the temp was listed as 24 or 25 degrees (room temp was approx. 24.)

For those interested: I've attached all three additional fans to a fan controller which is fed by a random 12V 1.5A adapter I had lying around (did some soldering.)

Does it work? (more images to come...)

[Dargonfly]

Yes it works! The PLA comes out, bonds firmly with its previous layer and cools down immediately! No warping!



It's a 40[mm] sphere with a flat bottom (as provided by Curious Aardvark)
The fact that you can see 'ripple circles' on the sides means that this is the maximum X-Y precision that this machine can handle (for now?)


Top looks pretty good too!

But then there's this:


It was printing in clockwise direction; so after every layer change it shook a bit and created this ripple effect. Near the end I figured that this was probably because the part didn't adhere that well to the surface (because it was almost tipping over the ball itself.. but it kept on printing!! What a trooper!)
I will keep an eye out of it 'might' just be the machine shaking.. but for now I'm assuming that this is just not good enough adhesion.

"BuildTak? What's up with that?", I thought..
So I read there website again and figured I might need to move the extruder head close to the surface.. but it doesn't extrude the first layer properly if I do this...

SO, for now this is my solution:
While building the first layer I push (by hand) the build plate upward in pulses.. (every one second I give it a little push) and it VISIBLY adheres the material at the point where I push it upwards (like point-welding!)

Still, not too happy with this.. might need to try using glue stick again..
Also not sure if this is because of the BuildTak, or the material, or the fact that the build plate is bend (at least 0.4[mm] differences between center and sides.)

I hope people can assist me with some of my issues, and I also hope that this is helpful for other people! As long as people find it at least interesting I'll keep updating with more 'test-prints'.

EDIT:
Also I found this pretty interesting;

The PLA sphere had no issues at all with the overhanging parts, while the ABS one is struggling in that area! Going to do some more testing and pretty soon I'll be able to make some quality figurines from PLA I think!

My overall progress so far:

All PLA (blue) parts in the front are a few weeks old, the one shown in the posts above are made last week.
Hehe, so happy I am understanding a bit more about 3D printing now!