I'm having a few issues printing PLA.

I discovered that many of my printing problems were caused by extruding too much filament, because my E steps per mm was set too high. I used Slic3rs extrusion multiplier setting to crank this down. Win!

However, now I don't always get a consistent extrusion - for instance sometimes my bottom layer will come out "patchy" in places, because the filament comes out in blobs rather than a line. It happens most frequently on the bottom layer, but it's happened on a higher layer too particularly when building up a wall.

I run at 182C hot-end and 65C bed. It's possible that a higher hot-end temperature would help, but I've generally found that this makes a blobby mess.

I think I've got my bed height correct - I recently got a glass plate and levelled it. The hot-end squishes the base layer slightly.

My nozzle is 0.35mm. My layer height is 0.25 mm and I manually set width/height to 1.4 (so that width would be 0.35mm, presumably).

Is there anything else I can try tweaking? Would lowering my width/height help?

I wouldn't set width over height manually in slicer until you can get decent prints, the automatic calculation is usually pretty good. If you do set it manually you should compute it from the extruded diameter not the nozzle size.
Printers and plastic vary but I slice PLA with a 1st layer temperature of 210 and subsequent layers at 190

Start with calibration cubes and work from there.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/08/2012 10:37PM by Polygonhell.