mountain peaks while printing

Morning all

I'm using repetier, slic3r with a prusa i3 kit (rp3d) and have printed about 40 hours of smaller jobs with no issues (see gauntlet pic). but when I go to print a larger diameter gauntlet pieces now I keep getting these little peaks (mountainpeak pic)which just continues on up as the gaps never fill. I seam to have clean flow when manually extruding, I have used my .4 mm drill bit to ensure I have a clean hole... and though have the default metal gear extruder it doesn't seem to be slipping, and I don't have any motor clicking or jumping. The bottom layer seems to print fine and have lots of material, it seams to be caused by the bottom perimeter layer starting out "bumpy". You can see the layer in the guantlet pic that has holes in it, i had increase the extruder to max to fill the holes and then cut back to get smooth lines again..Thoughts?

Thanks in advance..sorry if i left any pertinent information out

Try slicing with Cura. Slic3r does weird things sometimes.

Is the drive gear in the extruder clean?

Thanks Dentist, I tried slicing with Cura and i got the same issues, the bottom layers print perfect, lots of material, but the first perimeter is a little bumpy, and it gets worse from there. I'm going to try and slow the perimeter speed way down and see if i can't get it to smooth out. I clean the gear every couple of prints and it looks fine. Maybe its time to upgrade to the printed gear system.

Thanks for your time, truly appreciated

Check the wiring to the extruder motor. Sometimes the constant flexing can cause the wires to break inside their insulation making them intermittent. You can't tell by looking at it- you have to check resistance or just swap out the cable to see if there's any improvement. An intermittent wire problem can be dependent of the coordinates of the extruder- it may work fine in some places and not others because of the way the wires are flexing at different locations.

that makes sense, could be why the extruder isn't constantly depositing material at high speed or while filling under vibration