First Print Problems

Hi everyone- Through the help of many different people on the forums and IRC and in my local RUG I have managed to source and build my printer... have built the electronics and finally got my wiring issues straightened out... Tonight I tried my first print though and have seen several issues..

I'm using a Makergear hotend with Wade's Geared Extruder and 3mm PLA to start with...
My problems began right away... the first line or two came out just fine, but then it seemed like the hotend gummed up (after it hit the build platform for a brief moment - it was slightly out of alignment)...

So my questions are these:

1. It seems like it's not extruding enough plastic even when it was working - where can I change this? Is that in firmware? I'm using Sprinter if that helps... or is it in Skeinforge?
2. How can I clean out the hotend? The solid PLA going into the extruder doesn't want to back out... should I just leave it and when I start again let the heated barrel warm it up and the Wade's push it out again? Will that be fine?

What else should I be looking into? I'm not exactly sure how I should go about making sure that my new RepRap is configured properly... I sort of didn't believe I would ever get to this point and hadn't really researched any steps to take afterwards...

Thank you to this great community - you guys are just awesome!

I never empty my barrel when I change colours I use the new reel to push the old out by running the extruder from within repsnapper

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Experimenting in 3D in New Zealand

So as far as the extruder not putting out enough plastic - what should I be looking at? the E_Steps_per_mm setting? or is there somewhere else I can look into that?...

I think someone on IRC told me about a calculator somewhere for this sort of thing... should I be using that? (I think I can dig up that link again)..

Thanks-

It's a bit of both. If you are using SF40+, E_STEPS_PER_MM needs to be set to the number of steps required to push 1mm of filament into the extruder. There are various techniques to doing this, but I prefer marking 110mm up from the extruder on the filament and running 100mm into the extruder slowly via RepSnapper. Then you can calculate how much filament actually went into the extruder and scale your E_STEPS_PER_MM value accordingly. Repeat this process a few times and you'll get an accurate value.

Then in Skeinforge you need to enter the measured filament diameter (in Carve I think) and set the Flow and Feed Rate settings to the same value, 30 is probably a good starting point.

Regards,

James

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Check out my blog: AdventuresIn3-DPrinting

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jim_blag
It's a bit of both. If you are using SF40+, E_STEPS_PER_MM needs to be set to the number of steps required to push 1mm of filament into the extruder. There are various techniques to doing this, but I prefer marking 110mm up from the extruder on the filament and running 100mm into the extruder slowly via RepSnapper. Then you can calculate how much filament actually went into the extruder and scale your E_STEPS_PER_MM value accordingly. Repeat this process a few times and you'll get an accurate value.

I calibrated mine by removing the hot end, running 150mm of filament through the extruder, marked it close to the extruder, ran it 100mm backwards, measured, ran forwards, adjusted the firmware and repeated.

The advantage being that I wasn't actually running the hot end, so I was measuring the drive as it's supposed to work, rather than when it's grinding up filament because the hot end isn't working right.