Sore fingers, amazement, frustrations and hair spray: First days with my Creator Pro

[Serena]

Good to hear you are making progress!

When I look at the Tardis print I notice two things;
1) The corners of the first layers are 'bloopy' - might mean that your bed is a little bit too close (or the temp of extruder and heat bed combined are high resulting in material remelting)
2) The bridging isn't solid yet; this can be improved by cooling the material faster after it coming out of the extruder - or by increasing bridging speed / decreasing extrusion during bridging.

That said; it already looks pretty good and I think that just adding some cooling on the workpiece/extruder and tweaking the temperatures will already give you the results you are looking for.
Keep up the good work and keep us posted!

Yes I completely agree on the "bloopy-ness". So just to clarify my understanding- when you are bridging and it droops down the material is staying hot too long and needs to harden up quicker so I can either add fans, decrease temps or increase the speed during that section. Or possibly combinations of those. I will be working with temps first- since those are easiest for me to tweak. I havent tried a print where I adjusted the speed manually during different sections ( I am assuming you can do that?) so i will have to learn that next. So much to learn! It's so much fun though! I can't even believe how much I'm enjoying this. I literally cannot wait to get home and play.

With the Creator X/pro the adjustment points are a little closer together than they should be. What happens is if you set the extruder gap on the far right side, the left side will teeter up and be too close. Then you lower the left side and the right side teeters up. Try to set your extruder gaps right over the top of the adjustment points.

In my opinion you are spending far too much time on the "leveling". It really is a couple minute procedure to check and you should never have to make huge adjustments. I don't turn my adjusters more than 1/8 turn once I have a relatively flat surface.

Yes! That see-saw effect is what makes it tricky. I agree leveling should not be that time consuming. Or at least once you have a relatively level bed. Now it's not taking me long at all. Just tiny little tweaks here and there. I think in my inexperience I had gotten it pretty screwed up. Hopefully I will know better next time. I can tell I am getting a "feel" for it. And I think that's half the battle.

[Dargonfly]

Yes I completely agree on the "bloopy-ness". So just to clarify my understanding- when you are bridging and it droops down the material is staying hot too long and needs to harden up quicker so I can either add fans, decrease temps or increase the speed during that section. Or possibly combinations of those. I will be working with temps first- since those are easiest for me to tweak. I havent tried a print where I adjusted the speed manually during different sections ( I am assuming you can do that?) so i will have to learn that next. So much to learn! It's so much fun though! I can't even believe how much I'm enjoying this. I literally cannot wait to get home and play.

Yes, you got it.
Adjusting speed during different sections depends on the software: some can increase/decrease speed and/or extrusion rate during bridging (and then you can of course define what the software should see as a 'bridge'.
Other software allows you to create different processes for sections, thus allowing to create a section with a different speed.
If you do a lot of gcode editing you can probably do even more.. but I cannot confirm this. I only have experience with the above - but even that (changing speed/temp during a build) is not something you have/want to do often, because it's a lot of experimenting and doesn't necessarily give better results.
I currently have two setting-profiles; one for parts with infill and one for hollow parts. I open them and adjust some settings depending on the print, save it to SD, and start the build. (assuming my bed is level)

But I agree, it's a lot of fun to play with and there's is a lot to learn and even a lot to experiment in areas that others didn't dig that deep in yet.