Greetings and extrusion question

[skappes]

Greetings and thanks for the forum,
I received our kit (Rostock Max V2) early in October and with the help of my 11 year old son, printed the fan shroud yesterday.
I need to do more work on calibration. I got to the point that the nozzle was clearing the print bed at all three columns and looked to be similar in clearance, then just went for it. It came out great, the fan went in with no modification and it fit on the hot end without needing to loosen the screws.

Thanks for the great manual. With the exception of not being able the reconcile the column wire routing everything else went smoothly.

Finally the question, I'm completely new to this, apologies if this is completely obvious. The fan shroud printed well, I'm guessing because the bed was already warm from calibrating. I tried a couple of more prints using MatterControl's text model generator. They both failed miserably due to the hot end coming to temperature quickly and letting the plastic ooze out long before the bed warmed up. When the print started, there was nothing in the hotend. The first layer (or more) wasn't there, resulting in a jumble of plastic.

I know that I can warm the bed manually before starting a print but is it possible to tell the printer to warm the bed before heating the hotend?

Thanks,
Steve

[skappes]

I'm guessing that one solution is to set some number of loops before starting the print?

[PartDaddy]

If you download Matter Control from our download page, the profiles are already configured to generate "Skirt Loops". Typically 2 loops get the plastic flowing before starting the print. Only one level high is necessary.

[skappes]

I'm using the Touch, if there were loops I suspect the 1 inch characters were too small for 2 loops to have worked? I'll double check it tonight.
Thanks,

[PartDaddy]

Under General settings > Skirt and Raft > Loops = 2