New to this and have a problem with extrusion.

Hi all,

I took a bit of a punt and bought a £160 3d printer kit from Ebay. It is a Prusa i3 according to the ad. I've put it together and calibrated it and tried to print stuff.

I've been using Pronterface/Slic3r and Cura but am yet to have decent results. It doesn't seem to extrude enough filament. Now I did a test when I took the extruder off of the hot end cut the filament, and told pronterface to extrude 40mm, when i measured it had extruded 45mm. I was getting awful results where it seemed liek just not enough plastic was being laid down after much trial and Error I turn the extruded multiplier on the software ( I think this was on cura) up to £150%. and got my 'best' print.



http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...sw7xkodvq.jpeg


I cancelled it halfway through as the head was about 10mm above the print and not extruding anything, it also appears to have missed the top of the legs. I can't remember the exact model I used but it should have looked something like this.

My Question is what's wrong? it appears to not be extruding enough but when checked it is extruding too much and turned up 50% I still do not get enough out.

Here is my printer,

Please ignore the messy wires this was before I got my cable management kit:cool:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...psm33bsr4j.jpg

Would be interested in seeing peoples thoughts on this. I am new to 3d printing and I'm also considering these ebay £160 models...

What size filament are you using? The print results look like cases where people were using 1.75mm filament but hadn't changed the slicer default from 3mm. That's one way to end up with significant under-extrusion.

EDIT: On your calibration, have you went through the effort to calibrate the extrusion VOLUME, not just the filament input feed rate? Calibrating the volume typically involves printing a solid (100% infill) cube.

Thanks for the help I had a friend round who is very clued up of said the the extruder was slipping, he stripped it and put it back together and it works great now! However I did manage to blow a fuse on my Heated bed I'll be starting another thread then...

Anyway as for the kit I'm happy with it, for the money it is exceptional value. This was pretty much my 2nd attempt at a 'decent' print compared to the firsthttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...ps3qi4zdbd.jpg