The printer has been on the desk for a week and I have produced, by volume, considerably more swarf than parts. This is, I am assured, normal.
The first failure was the classic: nothing stuck. The filament drew a neat outline of the first layer, then peeled it straight back up and dragged it round the bed like a sad spaghetti lasso. I had spent twenty minutes levelling the bed by eye and felt very pleased with myself. The bed was not level. A sheet of paper under the nozzle, at all four corners plus the middle, fixed in five minutes what my confidence had failed to fix in twenty.
The second failure was warping. Big flat PLA part, corners lifting off the bed as it cooled, the whole thing slowly turning into a Pringle. A brim and a slightly hotter bed (60°C instead of the 50 I'd been using) sorted most of it. The rest was just turning the part fan down for the first few layers so the base had a chance to bond before it got blasted cold.
Then, on Friday, a clean one. A small bracket, no stringing, sharp corners, the layers all sitting where they were told. It is not a beautiful object and it holds up exactly one cable. But I made it from a coil of plastic and some maths, and I have been grinning at it on and off ever since. Onward to the second week, and presumably some entirely new failures.