Beginner questions

[hamster]

Hi everyone,

I'm a new owner of FF Creator Pro. Been experimenting with it for several days now, with mixed degrees of success (made a pretty cool looking owl, a skull and several unrecognizable blobs of plastic), and I have a few random questions.

* What's up with print corners curling up, especially for the first 5-10 mm above the platform? It's very pronounced with the "20 mm calibration box" model that came with the printer (I have not been able to get a perfectly square print yet, after several tries at different temperatures.) Bigger shapes come up more or less OK, but small pieces have it hard. It almost feels like the extruder feeds the material a bit too fast for its z-speed (each time it gets to each corner, it has to push the material under it down & out, which then partially rebounds but ultimately cools in a warped shape.) The platform is properly levelled (as well as I could level it), lowermost layers adhere to the platform, at least at first. With bigger pieces, sometimes the print starts fine, but, by the time we're 10 mm off the platform, curling in the upper layers pulls one or more corners of the support off the platform. I'm printing with ABS. I run the platform at 110-115 and the extruders at 220-230, with original kapton tape, with or without hairspray (can't tell yet if hairspray makes any difference.) The printer is fully enclosed and it's normal room temperature in the room.

* I have a 3 foot long thin gray wire (not USB, some sort of flat black plug) left over from the assembly. It's not mentioned in the start up guide and there are no apparent places where it might go. (To be exact, it says that there's a "sensor line" in the package, but it does not say what to do with it.) Is it just an extra piece or did I miss something? I also have a ton of extra screws and nuts - is that also normal?

* ReplicatorG software that came with the printer has filament thickness set to 1.82 mm by default. Is there a deep reason for that, should I change it to 1.75, or it does not matter?

* 0.1 mm layer thickness seems to present particular difficulties to the machine, I don't think I got even a single print right at 0.1. 0.2's come out OK as long as they don't tear off the platform, but 0.1's are mostly just unrecognizable. Is that to be expected?

* And finally, what do most people use for slicing? ReplicatorG defaults to Skeinforge, which seems to be doing a decent job but its performance is just murderous - I guess it should be expected from single-thread Python (1.5 hours to slice a moderate sized print, with a possibility of hanging up at the end, seriously?) KISSlicer seems to get good reviews, but it only does one extruder in the free version. I'm going to give Slic3r a spin.