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« on: December 29, 2014, 06:09:21 am »
Firstly Lbeach, welcome and congrats on buying your husband possibly the coolest thing he'll ever get for Christmas.
In response to your question, you'll need to be more specific. By "Messed up" exactly what do you mean? Is the extruder not pushing enough filament through? Or is it offsetting the "messed up" layers so they're not inline with the rest of the print?
My feeling is that it's likely "skipping steps" on the extruder side of things. ie, not enough filament is coming through on certain layers. There's a number of things which could cause this, but I suspect its temperature related as it seems to be with many others here. THere is no fix for this (if that's the case) other than to try different brands of PLA. Some melt at around 210 C, others much lowe at 180. Another possibility is to use a chip from an ABS cartridge with after market PLA being fed instead of ABS. THe chip definitely controls the temperature so changing chip types may help. Other possible issues could be to do with the alignment of the filament at the point it moves between the extruder toothed gear and the opposing pulley; if it's not going through straight, that can also cause issues.
I hate to say it, but im somewhat cynical about the stock firmware these units have loaded and the complete lack of ability to control calibration settings like temperature and speed. That's why I "frankencubed" my unit. I found that stock firmware was great for some things, and terrible for other things. Often the solution was merely being able to control temperature or print speed. Unfortunately, unless you want to screw with your unit further or modify the files you are printing with (just check out some other posts here for detail on both), you're out of luck.
Best of.
Dan