first print, need help with temperature questions

Hello, I'm a new RepRap novice. I've recently finished assembling a Prusa Mendel with a Gen 6 board, MakerGear hot end, and no heated bed. I planned to print PLA onto blue tape to start... but I'm having trouble getting to a first print.

Whenever I try to print, the extruder seems to have inconsistent flow. The first layer (the raft, I think?) will only end up with 1/4 to 1/2 of the filament on the bed. After some time I will just stop the print since it's obvious something is wrong.

I can set the temp in Pronterface manually, and manually extrude which seems to be working correctly, but I'm not sure. I set the temp to 180, and monitor it. It will go up to around 190-200 and then settle down to 180-185 and fluctuate around there if I just leave it idle for a while. If I manually extrude, a thin stream of filament will be emitted but sometimes it seems to clog, as there will be a rush of filament all at once. If it's sitting idle like this, eventually it will stop extruding after a manual push and just hang out.

However, when I try to print my test object (a small block) the temp is much higher, and the monitor reports that it's around 200 most of the time. I don't know if this is right, as everywhere I read that PLA is printed around 185, but on the other hand, on this Skeinforge wiki page the settings are higher, 200-210. [wiki.bitsfrombytes.com]

I'm just importing an STL file (made in Google Sketchup because I'm such a noob) into Pronterface and letting it call Skeinforge, I think. It does a lot of stuff and outputs a gcode file... I can see the M104 instruction in the gcode and none of those instructions send less than 200, I think. In the following the temp it's setting is 200, right? "M104 S200.0"

So what temperature should PLA be printed at? Should the "raft" be printed at a higher temp? Do I need to set something in Pronterface or Skeinforge in order to have the right temp? Is it something else altogether that's going wrong?

Sorry for the long drawn out post, since I'm not sure what the problem is, I'm not sure what info is useful.

Thanks for any help!

* edited to add that I wasn't sure where to post this so I picked the general one, sorry if there's a better place for troubleshooting types of posts...

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/26/2011 11:48PM by spacemanaki.

Sounds like the Temperature plugin is enabled. You can safely disable it. If you're using Skeinforge-40, you can grab my profile as a starting point if you'd like.

Ok, thanks, I'll try it tonight. Sorry if this is dense but can I just replace the folders (alterations, profiles) in my copy of skeinforge with those in your zip? Also is it important that I use version 40 and not 44? I just downloaded the latest one when installing printrun.

Thanks!

Yeah, that should work. I use SF-40 because that's the latest one that Replicatorg supports, but it should be backwards-compatible with -44. Let mw know if you have any problems with it.