Extruder Setting Error

I was going to post a picture of my latest calibration print and some questions about the issues I was seeing in the corners to the forums over at  http://forums.reprap.org/  I decided to search to see if the solution was already in the forums, and I came across a great forum and calibration tutorial that immediately showed me that my extruder settings were wrong.

Here is the blog:  http://richrap.blogspot.co.at/

And here is the first of three pages explaining how to calibrate the settings in Slic3r and your firmware to improve your prints:  http://richrap.blogspot.co.at/2012/01/slic3r-is-nicer-part-1-settings-and.html

After doing the test for extrusion length using a piece of tape on the filament, I found that when I told my machine to extrude 50 mm of filament it really extruded more like 82 mm.  Awesome--I found something definitely wrong that I can fix to improve performance. 

So a quick change to the steps per mm setting in Marlin and I was ready to re-slice and print out the 0.5 mm calibration object again and enjoy vastly improved print quality.  I was looking at RichRap's blog and not really paying attention to the print, and then I looked over and saw that the print was probably 90% done but only about 50% of the height I expected--I had made the change to the steps per mm to the Z-axis instead of the extruder!

It's funny how the machine just doesn't care.  "Ok fool, you want to make the Z-axis move that way?  Fine.  Here's your piece of crap you wanted to print.  I did my best.  Enjoy."  :)

I corrected the setting to the Z-axis and made the change to the extruder movement, but then my son woke up and it was time to come upstairs for the morning.  When he goes down for his nap this afternoon I will be able to print again .  I'm excited to see how much this correction affects the prints . . . 

D