Can't tell if Z-axis is correct, need picture of working filament coming out of extruder

I have been having constant problems with my printer (admittedly, most of them my own fault), mostly revolving around it not being able to stick to the print bed. I've *kinda* got it sorted out now and it mostly sticks when using hairspray, but it's mostly curling and I have to kinda pick at it with a pair of tweezers before it'll keep sticking. Does anyone have a photo of what something like white filament right after it's placed on the bed but before it has time to cool off and spread out, then what it should look like after it's printed some lines right next to each other on the first layer? I'm about 90% of the way there (I hope), but it would definitely be helpful to have an visual of what it should look like, for when I'm just laying there on the ground staring at the extruder head with fingers crossed. I've looked through the forums and found pictures of things like the first layer after it's already well established and you can see approximately what is being printed, but none where you can see a line left by the extruder within a few seconds of sticking to the bed.

If it helps, I'm using white PLA filament on the heated boro bed set to 60° and the extruder set to between 173° and 175°, as sometimes it won't flow right until it's hotter, then sometimes cooler.

I'm trying to grow my hair and it's not helping that I keep having to pull it out!

 

Take this advice for what it's worth as I am completely new to this and you probably know more then me! But I thought 190 c was the recommended temp for PLA. Even at 190 my white PLA seems to be having issues so I might need to go a little hotter again. Sorry I can't help on the visual as I am still calibrating myself (and pulling my hair out )

 

Using the short amount of blue filament that came with the printer (I thought it was ABS originally so I used those temperatures from the getting started guide, only thing is now I'm *fairly* certain that it's actually PLA; I'll have to test with some acetone once I get home, since I'm at work right now). When I was printing with the ABS heat settings, it seemed to print flawlessly until it got up a few inches high printing a thickness test (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:126007) vertically with no actual support other than how well it was sticking to the bed, and there was no hairspray being used.

Regarding the filament... this stuff was significantly less expensive than other options where I got it, so it might just be a classic case of "you get what you pay for" or something. I printed a couple shot-glasses (and got several free shots at the bar because of it! ) but there were little whiskers going around the center which is why I dropped the temperature a few degrees.

 

Mark,
So does that mean it should be actually coming out looking like little strips of scotch tape, more or less? If that's the case, it's no wonder that it keeps curling up on itself and won't stick! Thankfully, I'm *pretty* sure I've FINALLY got the bed level so that means is all I have to do now is tweak the Z-stop screw now. I was going based on someone's statement (don't remember when or where, unfortunately) that if you manually extrude it, it should go down straight instead of curling up on itself. I was also basing a lot of this on making sure the extruder was not oozing out, which is right about that temperature. There IS a chance I damaged the thermistor while messing it up the first time. I didn't press the stop switch in time so it was pushing its full weight on the extruder tip. There was a loud pop, but I wasn't sure what exactly caused it.

Sorry if I keep screwing it up so bad that it's painful to even think about. That's kind of a strange/irritating habit of mine, but once I get over the first hurdle here I'm pretty sure I can get things working nicely after all the digging I've gone through so far.

 

Update: I just remembered that for all of my prints, the external portions of the first layer would routinely just kind of peel off, somewhat resembling pieces of thick fishing line or possibly kite string soaked in glue to retain its shape. Once I get home I'll try to take some pictures of the different things and find some wire to compare it with; from memory I'd say it's probably closest in size to breadboard wire, without the insulation.

 

I am using zen PLA white filament and I lay my first layer at 195 and the bed is 70. Then for the rest of the layers I use 188 and 65 on the bed. I also use hairspray.

I do three loops around before actually printing the model. As its doing these loops I manually twist the z threaded rods until its laying some what flat. I also print my first layer at 20mm/s. I am sure this is extremely slow by some standards but I am patient so no biggy.

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I've been looking through a lot of his posts, but it's always really hard to see exactly what it should look like because the black plating underneath of the glass leaves a very large gap. It might just be me, but the angle makes it difficult. I'm looking for something maybe like... 10° incline so that I can see the layer and the glass easily. But then, knowing my luck with this thing it'll just make it that much harder to figure out

 

With hair spray I can vouch for this!!!
What I did to get used to adjusting the rods was do 5 loops around a calibration cube. This gave me enough time to train my eye to what it should look like

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Sweet Odin's beard! It actually printed the 50mm calibration angle test PERFECTLY! I adjusted the stop screw one quarter turn and changed the temperature to 185° for first layer and 180° for the rest (I know, I know, if you change two variables at the same time you're going to have a Bad Time) and it came out beautiful! It stuck to the bed nicely, too. After the first loop of the skirt where it looked like it was WAY too low (kept having little "skips" where the plastic bunched up and then the line looked like it was scraped out or something), but everything else was perfect except for that thing with Repetier pausing a couple times during the print where you have to hit "OK" in manual control. Smashing success!

Next step: Printing a coworker some jewelry because I offered to print one thing per person from Thingiverse for my team at work, because they all share in our collective agony. This kinda stuff is one of the major reasons I bought this thing to start with.

 

Sweet!!! I know the feeling when your first print is a success!!!!!

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All that work, and now my extruder head is jammed again after trying to print the bottom of my Full Graphics Controller enclosure, about halfway through making the first layer infill. I'm going to try a less aggressive infill (probably like 70%?) for the first layer and do the infill first. On the plus side, it printed the 50mm calibration angle and 5mm calibration cube without any difficulty before it jammed, so there's that... I'm starting to wonder if either the temperature is still wrong or if I've melted/dislodged the PEEK/whatever tube, which would likely require an entire extruder replacement... For some reason or another, the head (while it was still running at ~175°) would keep climbing until ~190° after the print had completed/been aborted before it would start cooling down. This makes me wonder if I may also have screwed up the thermistor, but I don't have any safe method to check a temperature that high. As of right now I've laid down three thick layers of Aqua Net and left them to dry overnight. It might just be that because of how much infill was laid down it eventually just started pushing until there was no direction to go but up the nozzle. But this will take a lot of experimentation.

On the plus side, I saw Tesseract's post of a cross-section of extruded filament the other day which is exactly what I was looking for, only it was a drawing instead of an actual picture. So there's that.