Printing quality, see picture

I am using a Mendel.
The support material is meant to be one smooth line but is filled with holes and the edges of my models are also very poor (blobby), especially where it was bridging.
Any ideas on how to correct this?

The extruder seems to be dragging a little but in my opinion not enough to be causing this.

Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/14/2013 12:13PM by Charles Fried.

Since I'm not real sure what that part is supposed to look like, it's a bit hard to judge exactly what's going on. First guess would be your extruder flow isn't high enough for any of a number of reasons. Second guess would be speed settings.

If you are using Slic3r - what happens when you try to print a 20-25 mm hollow cube with the spiral vaise setting? It's a real quick print and it should tell you a lot about what's going on.

Hey Charles,

Has this printer worked, and then stopped working as above, or is this a new setup in need of some calibration? (Calibration is critically important, and people tend to overlook the esteps/mm setting that could be influencing what I see here.)

And for what it's worth, the support material doesn't always look like a smooth line from layer to layer. See this photo, for instance.