Rant on - Bad luck with Itty Bitty Extruder

First off, I love the design work and respect what Clough42 has done for the community. His designs and work has raised the bar for out printers and I humbly thank him. I think it is me that is not up to the task, not the designs.

I was having great success with my stock extruder but I wanted even better prints. I looked at some bowden setups to try and reduce the moving weight of the printer. After some digging I decided a bowden wasn't right for me.

Which lead me to the Itty Bitty Single extruder. I purchased the parts and printed the extruder and really liked the design of it. One flaw, my motor got crazy hot (over 90 degrees!). I couldn't get the driver voltage low enough to reduce the temps without major skipping.

So, the tweaker in me came up with a plan to use a bigger gear to turn the hobbed bolt and a smaller pulley to yield a greater mechanical advantage. I am able to get some decent prints at the expense of time. Man, I am having issues. My Esteps are around 900 to get a nice solid top layer, but it is hit to miss. For example, I am printing a calibration print with multiple steps. The first steps are beautiful and flat. nice glossy finish, then at next steps get progressively worse. No where near the quality of the first.

Now I am having clogging issues. I printed a part multiple times using sequential printing. The first one was great, second part resulted in a failed print.

What am I doing wrong? I can't seem to get this extruder to work and I have performed the calibration procedure multiple times! I am about to give up on this extruder and go back to stock. Could my driver be failing? Bad motor? The problems are erratic in nature and i can't find a pattern to diagnose. It is driving me nuts!

I modified the Itty Bitty to use a 104 tooth and an 18 tooth pull with a 228 tooth belt.
E3dv6 hotend with a .4mm nozzle for 3mm filament
Retraction settings are 1mm @20mm/s
Printing at 60mm/s or slower.