Width and filling troubles

Hi,

I am having troubles printing nice parts these days, as you can see with the picture attached.
The problem is the plastic parts aren't being infilled entirely, and some gaps appear with little isles in the middle...

I am using a prusa mendel i2, repetier host and slic3r with marlin. I tried a lot to fix the problem :
- checking calibration (extruder and all axis are properly configurated)
- cleaning the hot end
- cleaning the hobbed bolt
- checking belt tension
- checking pololus' amperage
- playing with the extrusion width in slic3r
- even starting with the default calibration from slic3r !

All of my tests were useless, and even starting with a new calibration profile changed nothing.

I'm out of ideas, I don't know if it's a mechanical, electronical problem or something with slic3r, but everything worked great before and I've never had to change any width parameter.

If any of you have some clues of what's going on, I will be glad to hear them !

Illustrations : [hpics.li]

I feel your frustration...

I used to somewhat like Slic3r, starting back with v7.02b, the more slicer was tinkered with (v8.x - v9.x) the worse things got. BAD Prints, artifacts and blobs shooting out of random places everywhere, ugly gcode etc. It just never stopped getting worse... Enough is Enough !!!

I WASTED hours, days, weeks and months trying to refine my Slic3r settings, only to eventually realize it was the slicers problem, and not my depth of knowledge of understanding the physics of the material and process of how to create beautiful successful 3D Prints. I initially liked Slic3r verses Skeinforge as I could easily and quickly slice simple objects.

So next I went to Skeinforge v40 - v50, tired of junk prints with Slic3r, spent a few hundred hours learning Skienforge, writing custom profiles, and producing GOOD Clean Prints, free of the BS artifacts that Slic3r produces (no matter what version you use). But then I hit a roadblock with Skeinforge, if you have a larger stl. file with complex geometry, Skeinforge will appear to slice it, only to result in could not write gcode due to Skeinforge's memory allocation limitations. I was screwed as I had a project that I needed to print for a client. What to do now; find a new slicer ?

Thank God (or Jonathan the author of KISSlicer), for actually creating an AWESOME Slicer, KISSlicer version 1.1.0. I now could slice large stl files with complex geometry quickly and accurately and with no weird artifacts/blobbing. Saved the day totally ! Sure KISSlicer is still lacking in many of the features Skeinforge has, like bridging, external only support and brim. But I could actually now print more than simple ugly trinkets, and now satisfy my needs and my clients needs to be able to print large complex prints.

Now I use KISSlicer version 1.1.0.for most printing jobs, and only use Skeinforge for small, simple geometry that I need only external print support.
[kisslicer.com]
[kisslicer.com]

Hope this helps.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2013 11:32AM by ShawnT98027.

Since the problem manifested suddenly, I think the source of the problem is mechanical, and not your settings. Just because belt tension is tight, it does not mean it's good. Check the individual axes for the presence of backlash.

Move the axis under test 50mm in one direction, and then start incremental 0.1mm moves in the opposite direction. See how many clicks it takes to move. Do this in both directions on X and Y.

Oh, and get all your setting back to where they were before you started changing everything.