Help With Setup

I'v got one more issue to troubleshoot and my printer should work, please help!

i'v hand built a box prusa i3 using slic3r and sprinter firmware, standard gregs wade extruder. This issue will just be a numeric setting for some speed somewhere, so pretty easy to fix.

problem is , when transitioning to infill from say building a base and first outer wall layer, printer will spin the extruder RIDICULOUSLY fast for a couple of seconds, do a bit, spin it AGAIN. Horrible crunching noises come from the motor which is spinning inside its cog and has already shredded the filament. then it settles and does another layer normal speed, does another outer wall slice AND RPEAT SPIN. all other speeds are great and very slow compared to this burst. I dont know what it thinks its doing

so i need to reduce my transition to infill speed but i dont know its name or location,

please help thanks

I run gregs wade extruder on my alu plate i3. It does turn really fast when retracting material on slic3r. So gears turn opposite direction compared to extruding. Is that what you experience?
There should be retracting speed setting in slic3r.

Also make sure that your gears are alligned. I had to put an extra washer under big gear to get that. And put some oil between those gears. Make sure you have decent tension on hinged part of extruder. I can not pull that hinged part back with my fingers if plastic material is inserted in extruder.

thanks, it was forward spinning. i have labotamised all speeds down to 10mm/s in slicer and that has stabilised it. i think it was some perimeter setting perhaps. doesnt seem to do it when the whole slice is solid, only on infil slices. atleast its printing a test cube fine n i know the issue is probably g-code based. cheers

You can try different slicers. I found Cura to be a lot better than slic3r. But cura just like slic3r was not precise in calculating material flow. I print parts that fit together and that was not possible to do. After a lot of messing (a couple hundreds grams of plastic ruined) with flow compensation and even changing models dimensions in cad software I had to give up on Cura. Other than that it was very good.
And now I use kisslicer which is perfect for my use. By lowering outer perimeter speed I can make very high quality looking parts. Flow is perfect. Only negativity is bridging as it has no seperate option for that so I just have to use support which is really great in this software. For me its like skeinforge with user interface that human being can understand. Has all the options that I missed in earlier used slicers.
Good luck.

yeah i'v seen a lot of positive talk about KISSslicer recently. My impression is that it gives a nicer finish than slicer a lot of the time (nowadays). I like the fact there's a 3d view of the objct aswell. (If theres one in slicer i havent noticed it. cura still seems a work in progress, no support for multi extruders either. i def plan to add atleast another extruder to my setup. anyone know a ramps equiv board that handles a ton of different motors. say 8 ?

Ramps has place for a second extruder. But... Is it possible to use three extruders on prusa i3? How do they all fit on X axis rods? Looks to me that X axis travel would be a lot shorter. I guess that distant extruders with teflon tubes would be a must in this configuration.

Btw. I also missed feature from cura where you can rotate your part anyhow you want on the bed. On kisslicer that is not possible. But solution is to upload your stl to cura, rotate it there any way you want and save it as a model. Ad .stl to its name then saving. Then upload this new stl to kisslicer and there you have it Someone might find this usable

Oh, and there is a 3D view in newest version of slic3r.

yeah i reckon you could get 3 j-heads on an i3 bowden style. Like the mendel max tri color. I;v got some ptfe tubing i'm going to play with when i get the i3 print tested to a good/high quality. i know some kind of slave pololulu (?) board can be used to extend the motor drivers of a ramps setup but I wondr how tough it'd be to home build a ramps type extended pcb (more motors) and attach it to an arduino mega.

Interesting about slicer, I must not have latest version. having trouble getting infill to work but i think what it is is that i have too much material being extruded so on 40% it is actually infilling the entire area. also printed a companion cube and the lid didnt fit, so another indication of too much plastic output.