Hotend heating problems..(sturdy mendel90)

I'm at my wits end.. I had problems with my Melzi not reading the correct temp in pronterface. My heated bed uses a Epcos B57861S104F40 100K 1% thermistor and the temp was reading 20c over room temp. I soldered two 9.1k ohm 1w resistors and the temp finally read correctly on the hotend and bed.

Now the problem is my hotend(http://www.ebay.com/itm/271339421020) doesn't seem able to melt any plastic. I removed the extruder bolt and tried manually forcing PLA through.. no go
I set the temp as high as I could in pronterface and it still wasn't hot enough to extrude anything.

In marlin I've tried every thermistor setting in the configuration file..nothing is working.

The only way I have to measure temp is a meat thermometer for now urg.. but I know the hotend is at least going past 104 C(220F is the max on my thermometer).

So any kind soul have any ideas what I can try next?

104 is nowhere near hot enough for pla. I've heard of some printing as low as 160, but most run between 180-190 deg c. I start at 189 for first layer, the drop to 185 for subsequent layers.

Need to get hold of a proper temp probe to be sure you are hitting the higher temps. Does your heat bed come up to temp?

Thanks for the reply, I have tried setting my hotend to 195 from there I raised the temp in pronterface by 10 degrees each time while trying to force PLA through the hotend by hand.

Even when I set pronterface to 260 (the max allowed by firmware) I couldn't feed any PLA through by hand.

When I set my heatbed to 60 C my thermometer reads 48 C

So i'm more than 20C off in temp which I assume gets even worse the higher I go otherwise when I set my hotend to past 240C I should of been at least to push some filament.

From reading around it seems I may have some problems in my temp tables? I'm using Nophead's marlin version from github.

Well after finally ripping the hotend apart and doing some testing via [reprap.org] I made some tables. I had a friend come over and assist with a infrared thermometer the final result is my thermistor is garbage so I have a new one on it's way.


Lesson learned the hardway - Don't skimp on some parts!