New mini owner w/questions

So I received my mini today … 30 minutes later I had a rockopuss. What a completely different experience than the cupcake kit I made in 2010 ( and put away after never really getting any good results ). Getting going with this mini was such a better experience.

So now I have a few questions:

How do I dial in the settings? I printed out a 10x10x10 cube and it was slightly oversized 10.25 mm instead of 10. This was with some PLA i got off of ebay a while back. I should see my lulzbot filament show up in the next couple of days. Til then I was just hoping to become more familiar. I loaded up the PLA_medium profile after using the fast print in simple mode and realized that the default filament size was probably wrong. I changed it from the 2.85mm to the 2.97mm I measured. I’m waiting on a new print to see if that makes a difference. * and yes it did *

Another thing I’m wondering about, is the Z axis zeroing. When it goes through its bed Z axis level detection scheme, the first corner (the one near x0, y0) seems to get pushed down on the bed down pretty aggressively. Do I need to worry about the y rods getting bent? They are certainly flexing.

Thanks again for a great first print experience. You guys are great and I’m pretty psyched about being able to actually make things with a 3d printer.

-rick

BTW:

http://oi57.tinypic.com/2w1tw1l.jpg - start of rocktopus
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=313rpzk&s=8#.VNwTld-1W92 - final rocktopus
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2rxzec8&s=8#.VNwTLd-1W90 - valentine key chain with gears

My filament came in 2 days before the mini. What a tease that was. Sorry can’t help with questions as I’m new myself.
Cheers. :slight_smile:

It shouldn’t push down on the corner aggressively. It should just touch it enough to complete a circuit. From the print, it looks like it leveled fine. Just make sure the nozzle pad & nozzle look clean (no fuzz or anything).

Just some additional information… I have seen my Mini press the corner washer hard enough to deflect it a bit. When that happened, the first layer was printing a bit low. The nozzle just wasn’t quite clean. I restarted the print and cleaned the nozzle with the steel brush. All was good after that.

I didn’t smash the corner washer or anything, just deflected it slightly, squished the ninja flex. Normally it just lightly touches.

I pulled out the Z probing into a different post. You can follow it here:

https://forum.lulzbot.com/t/agressive-z-probing-on-mini/1267/1

-rick