First Print. Cant get it to flow or print right.

This is my first printer and first print. I built a prusa mendel i2 and i am using 3mm ABS filament. I have set the Extruder to 230 and I have checked that it was heating up right with a laser thermometer and the heat bed to 60C. I am using a Sanguino ver. 1.3A if it makes a difference. I have the Z axis home to the point where I can just fit about 3-4 pieces of regular printer paper under it. When I go to print I am using Pronterface on a Mac. I have it set to extrude at 60mm/min. When it starts the print it looks like it isnt extruding enough and when it looks like it is printing it starts to drag the filament that was already printed. I have looked online for the congregation settings and the temps and the how far the Z axel is up at the start have been what I have found. I haven't gotten it to print anything at all over the past few days. Are my Specs right?

Did you calibrate your E step/mm ? It seems that you don't extrude enough plastic.
Before trying to print anything, you should first ensure that the printer behave exactly like it should by calibrating everything.

Unless you bought a commercial printer ready to go, you must always double check everything since every manufacturer of opensource printer will use its own modification (pulley diameter, extruder gear ratio, ...). I had the same problem on my homemade repstrap, I had to change both the E step/mm and driver current (sometimes it missed steps leading to a non consistant flow rate).

No I didn't calibrate it. Wasn't aware I had to. How would I go about calibrating the E motor?

You can do it two ways :

- theoretically, by the gear ratio of your extruder :
E step/mm = (µ_step * step/rev *G2)/(G1*pi*Dh)

Where :

- µ_step is the number of microstep per step of your driver (usually 16)
- step/rev is the number of step per turn of your motor (usually 200)
- G2 is the number of teeth of the big gear on the hobbed bolt
- G1 is the number of teeth on the gear of the extruder motor
- Dh is the diameter in mm of your hobbed bolt (at the hobbed section, around 7 mm)

For sure, the exact formula depend on the extruder type (direct drive, ...), this one is for my Wade.

It should give you a good starting point (for me, it was perfect).
Then, if you want to be more precise, you have to manually extrude a length of filament under Pronterface (for example).
To do so, you put your hotend at required temperature for you material and then you put a mark with a marker on the filament (feeding side) at a know distance from your extruder. You ask pronterface to extrude something like 5 or 10 mm of filament and you measure the new distance of the mark from its previous point.
If there is a difference between the asked length and the real length, you do the math to adjust your E step/mm value.

I found the best way to calibrate your extruder steps is to first do the math as bravach suggests, then finally follow triffid hunter's calibration guide here. This will jump you to the extruder calibration section, but the whole document is gold and worth going through.