extruder sticking/clicking since switching to direct drive

Hi all,

I've recently upgraded my Creality ender3 to direct drive using the barsarba innovations kit (the one from e-bay)

Since the upgrade I've had issues with intermittent clicking of the extruder. Seems like it can't feed the filament as fast as requested, so the back pressure is causing these clicks/skips.
The extruder never had these issues when hooked up with the default bowden, and using the same print settings that worked successfully there don't work well with the direct drive.
I initially attributed this to the flex in the bowden line allowing it to absorb the extra pressure, but even after decreasing my print speeds from 60mm/s down to 45, I still get the clicking on the extruder.

So far have tried the following:
* lowering print speed
* decreasing layer height
* reduced retraction to 2mm
* varied the hotend temp
* checking that tube is properly/fully seated in the hotend
* replacing the nozzle with a fresh/clean one
* checking that the extruder lever isn't too tight or binding
but it still clicks intermittently on parts that ran perfectly fine with the bowden.
The really strange part is it's not even consistent on which sections in the layer where it binds up. It seems completely random.

I've done some tests in pronterface, and it seems the extruder can handle speeds of 150mm/s. Anything higher than that, and the clicking starts. The strange part is that pronterface shows the max extruder speed at 50, so I have no idea how the firmware is even allowing faster extrusion rates. But I guess that's another issue.
I'm using cura for slicing and can't find any settings that would allow me to set a E feedrate limit of 150mm/s.

Any ideas?
thanks

umm yeah, printing faster than 150mms on an i3 is probably more than a little ambitious.

to get prints that fast on any machine, you need really good higher-temp pla and - obviously - change the print head temperature.

It also depends on the layer height, nozzle diameter etc.

But basically you don't have a problem, just unrealistic ideas of how fast you can print :-)

Can't help with cura, personally i think it's the worst slicer out there.

I wasn't printing at 150. I was printing at 60mm/s, and took it down to 45, and still have the issues.
The 150 number was just my extrusion speed tests in pronterface. After reading further I realized that that 150 number meant per min, not sec.