I spent lots of time this weekend tweaking my Taz 5's setup with the new dual extruder. I pulled out all the stops and leveled the bed with the touch off gauge from the shop. That made everything much easier and helped improve print quality tremendously.

I ran into some issues with software and hardware. It turned out that the Simplify 3D software did not work for me at all. I didnt actually make any progress printing until I ditched the very expensive software and went back to Cura. I am not sold on it. I also subsiquently ran into issues with solidworks on my computer. It would take several minutes to start up and would just hang. I ended up resetting windows and starting essentially with a fresh install. The SSD in my laptop made installing everything super quick and by lunch time on Sunday Solidworks was working again.

A full day and a half of tweaking hardware and software settings eventually resulted in successfully printing the checkered octopus. As you can see previous prints had quality issues and generally didnt work. I also ran into some challenges with exporting .STL files from solidworks and having them mate up properly in Cura. It seemed the origin would change and they wouldnt go together right despite being made from the same part. I eventually figured out what was wrong (turns out I just needed to tick a box in the export settings, typical simple solution to an annoying problem in solidworks) and successfully created and exported my design for a Palatov D2 shift knob with the Palatov Dragon contrasting with the rest of the shift knobs color. Hopefully it turns out as great as it looks in the computer!