Tapered prints.

Every print coming off my printer has a taper on the face that is in contact with print bed. If I intend to print a cylinder the area of the circle in contact with the bed is a larger than the area of the circle at the top of the print. Its causing problems when I try to mate parts. If I print a shaft and a hole, the tapered ends of both parts make it impossible to pass the shaft all the way through the hole.
I’ve tried to resolve the issue with, no kidding, probably 30 test prints but I haven’t found the right fix. Please see the attached picture of a couple of shafts that have the taper. I appreciate the help, thanks!

If your starting Z layer height isn’t 100% dead on perfect, you will tend to get that flare at the bottom of a part. About the only method to combat it that works completely consistently is implementing one of the automatic bed leveling techniques and upgrading all the aspects of your machine that you can for greater accuracy. Or, just assume it’s going to do that and trim accordingly

Are you using hairspray?

Nope, not using hair spray.

Piercet,

I’m not sure its the levelness of the bed. I’ve used the same bed leveling technique on my lulzbot as I have on my friends makerbot and he doesn’t have the same issue. I watched most of the prints and I can see that for first ~.05 - .1 inch of the part, regardless of the layer height value, the filament always seems to be flattened more so than the remaining layers. I looked at the variable layer height settings in slicer and made sure that they layer height was constant throughout and I’m still getting the taper. Its driving me crazy…lol!

Hmm. Have you upgraded the firmware at all? Maybe the Z steps value is off slightly from what it should be? Aside from that, the pictures look like what happens when you have your first layer too low to me. Could also certanly be something I just haven’t ran into before too.

The bed can cause that if it’s running slightly warmer than it would like. You may want to set the bed cooler by 5 degrees to see if that takes care of the flaring, while still allowing for good part adhesion.

Here is webpage I found describing the exact issue I’m still encountering. Scroll down to “Printing Defects: Flashing” section. Anyone else having the same problem?

http://fab.heatsynclabs.org/