Hobbed bolt loading up

I think I've solved this now, but my hobbed bolt has been loading up with plastic. The solution seemes to be just the right amount of pressure on the idler bearing that pushes the filament into the hobbed bolt. With the ends of the bolts flush with the bearing housing, the filament eventually slipped with a noticeable clicking sound. It would then begin to slip more often, usually fairly quickly. Holding the filament by hand with a bit of downward pressure made it very obvious what was happening.

Tightening the bolts until the springs were nearly compressed, and the ends of the bolts nearing the motor, actually made things worse, but with around three threads proud of the bearing housing, I've just printed two Androids and found absolutely no plastic on the hobbed bolt.

The hobbed bolt filling up was making it hard for me to find the right value for E_STEPS_PER_MM. I'm looking forward to nailing it down before I run out of the green filament that came with the kit.

Actually, I didn't have this solved. I wasn't having luck with anything that I sliced myself, but Nop Head's included Android G-code printed fine... Or at least good.

Comparing the G-code between the android and my self-sliced calibration object made it clear that the extrusion rate was pretty high. About 8 times too high. Surfing through the settings in Skeinforge (most of which are Matrix-code to me), I saw that the filament diameter was set to 1mm.

The next print was the first self-sliced that didn't make me want to cry a little. It still has big issues (like not sticking to the glass) but excepting those artifacts it actually looks somewhat like the 20x20x10mm half-cube it should be.

Progress.

I have never needed to compress the springs any further but I think the temperature in the android file may be a bit low. 220C is better for the green PLA.

Increasing the bed temperature to 70C will help is stick better. Make sure the glass is clean of any finger prints and make sure the first layer height is correct.

I can't see how you ended up with a filament diameter of 1mm. It should be about 2.86 in the config I distribute. It was the config used to generate the test file but it actually set up as the ABS profile by mistake.

---

[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

I'm not sure how it happened either. I'm sure it is my mistake.

Did a few test prints and checked the hobbed bolt. It was clean.

Just gave 220C/70C a try. The print stuck to the bed nicely.

Thanks a lot for the infromation. I woudn't know what to do if it weren't for your great suggestions. Suprisingly, it worked.