MakerBot Industries

Thanks for the reply Aubenc, it got me over that problem.

I had a play altering the gcode in the gcode tab. Then wanted to make it permanent. The story, in case there are other noobs trying to figgure things out;

After many attempts, changing the start.gcode in the various directories inside the Replicator directory I figgured that you meant the one in the user profiles directory.

eg: C:\Users\username\.replicatorg\sf_35_profiles\profileName\alterations
not
…\replicatorg-0029_r2\skein_engines\…

I now have it running with a surface temp of 80, this seems to give a good balance between sticking and melting. The extrusion temp is 180, again seems good. This mix was giving me OK calibration cubes with a little deformation on the corners but acceptable for now. They are too sparse at the moment but I'll play with this a bit more (up the flow rate?)

I was printing with a raft because I have not yet found any blue painters tape (no time to get to a store) and yes, it is definately not a nice thing removing a raft in PLA. Now i want to try some overhang builds (like the example knot) and i understand that a raft is needed for the support option to work.

Yes raft plugin is turned on but read the raft.py in wordpad which tells you what each setting does. You can define no raft layers and still have support.
http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2011/05/05/makerbot-microtip-skeinforge-secrets-hidden-in-plain-sight/

TIP= you want to set both "Base Layers" and "Interface Layers" to 0. Default is 1 base and 2 interface thus 3 layer raft.

To EDIT profiles go here
http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2011/11/09/replicator-g-0027-released/

To edit profiles, go to ReplicatorG’s “GCode” menu and click “Edit Base Profiles.” There, you’ll see the old Edit/Duplicate options.

Also note, you may have changed the temps in start.gcode but now, you also need to change the temps in the profile temp tab since likely, you started at the desired temp but as soon as it got past the start.gcode, it likely went to 225C on the extruder head. Just change them all to 180C since that's you working temp.

Another good link on support material
http://www.protoparadigm.com/2012/01/printing-with-support-extreme-overhangs/