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

[curious aardvark]

I started not heating before bed levelling and didn't get great results.

You heat the bed to the printing temp before levelling because the metal expands and the calibration of a cool bed is different to the calibration of the same bed at a higher temp.

I pretty much only calibrate after changing filiment or changing bed temp (for nylon or pla) But because miniscule differences in printhead to bed distance can make a lot of difference to how things print - I would say you should always calibrate the bed at the temp you intend to print at.

It's definitely made a lot of difference to my prints.

As for levelling - print a set of these knobs and you won't burn your fingers any more :-)
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:243998
Use some of the spare nuts that came in your little bag of bits.

The other obvious thing is that your print bed isn't perfectly level. Mine wasn't.
I now use a 3mm aluminium sheet on top of the original bed and it's perfectly level. I can calibrate the edges and the centre is spot on. With the original bed I calibrated the edges and the centre was always much higher. ie: it bowed up in the middle.
So it was impossible to calbrate more than the centre of the print bed.

Hence I could print in the centre but anything of any size never stuck properly.

Things are much better now.

Change filament and use the other nozzle.
Looks like you might have some blockage.

I got two rolls of abs from flashforge. A white roll that was amazing stuff and a blue roll that blocked my printhead after a couple of prints.
I haven't touched the blue since and have had no more blockages.

I've bought a bunch of cheap filament off ebay and so far - it's all been good.
The 'silver' was a dull grey, but that's my only issue with the cheap stuff.

But yeah that triangle definitely looks like a partially clogged nozzle to me.

The owl doesn't need supports.

Printing with raft really works well. Okay you don't get a great finish on the bottom - but it's pretty much bombproof.
For larger prints you still need a perfectly level bed though.

This whole diy 3d printing arena is still very much more of an art than a science.
What works for me - won't necessarily work for you - and vice versa. There are so many factors to take into account.

But the basics should stand most people in good stead.
The most important thing is a perfectly level bed that's calibrated correctly.

Second is finding something your prints stick to - I currently use blue tape. But given dargonfly's experience am seriously considering the build tak stuff.

Third is getting temps both of the bed and printhead to match with the filament.
I've found that nylon 618 will stick really well at 30c but not at 20 or 40. Likewise different rolls of abs print better at different temperatures.

Fourth is getting to grips with the software. Print speeds, don't seem to make much difference to me - but they might to you.

I don't do much printing without rafts as it just takes a tiny bit of rouge filament to screw the whole thing up. But hopefully I will when I've sat down and really worked my way through proftweak and got some kind of control over my first layer speed and extrusion.

The thing that's made the biggest difference in the quality of my prints (not my ability to print, but how well they turn out) is adding a ducted fan to blow on the area being printed.
that's thoroughly recommended.

I bought a 24volt fan and hooked it up to the 24volt stepper motor cooling fan connector on the motherboard. Works great.
Use these for the duct setup.

It's these two:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:295317
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:350649
Combined together, both printed in ABS. As you can see in the first link it has ducts that redirect the air to where the extruder is placing the material, thus cooling the extruded material that much faster! Because you want the material to cool from +-230 degrees to 30 degrees as fast as possible so that it retains its shape and doesn't warp.

So there are a bunch of things that all go together to make a succesful print.
Try all of the above and if none of that works - I'm sure we can think of other stuff for you to try :-)