Hi Guys
I’m very new to 3D printing, I’ve had my Wanhao i3 Plus for a week now, and one of the issues I was facing with my prints was that the first layer, while sticking reliable to the bed, looked horrible. The inner and outer shells looked like they were separate from one another and back and forward strokes of the bottom layer also had gaps in between. This is print number 1 in the attached picture.
The first thing i did to fix this was make sure that my x-axis horizontal bars were level with the base of the printer. Because they weren’t level this was stopping me from raising the bed any further as the thumb screws were already as loose as they could get on the one side. With this fixed I could properly level the bed and raise it to be closer to the nozzle when the z-axis is in its lowest position. I also increased my first layer extrusion temperature to 210C from 195C and increased the first layer bed temperature from 50C to 60C. Subsequent layers are printed at 200C and 50C bed temperature. The results of these changes gave me print number 2 in the attached picture.
This print was a lot better but lines are still pretty obvious in the middle of the face. I tried loosening each thumb screw by a fraction of a turn and printed again but this caused the bed to be a bit too low. As you can see in print 3, the lines are overlapping each other a lot because the first layer was being squashed so much. This also caused the outer layer to spread out and almost fuse completely with the brim, making it very difficult to get off.
So I turned the thumb screws back a little bit and now I have print 4 which i think is a pretty good middle ground between 2 and 3. I’m very happy with the surface now and prints I’ve done after making these changes have come out with very smooth bottom layers.
This isn’t really intended as a guide, I don’t think I’m qualified for that with only a week’s worth of experience haha. I just thought I’d post this because I hadn’t really seen anything else to help sort out this problem specifically. If I’ve said anything you think is incorrect or think there is something I can do better please let me know 
Bacco
2
Hi Matthew, you did well to share your experience, but I think there is another problem. From the slicer program you use, you’ll have set it as filament width 2.8 and maybe you have a 1.75 filament. At least it seems to me that the distance between the layers is too much.
