The motor that pushes the filament into the extruder, usually sits on the inside in the original design and this causes all sorts of problems. In my setup it's mounted outside and therefore is kept cooler and therefore greatly reduces any grinding.

Bowden setups are essentially push based setups that push the filament through a tight tube. All the mods you need are found in this long long long thread.

http://www.soliforum.com/topic/9709/e3d … dle-press/

Unfortunately you'll have to read and find all the links yourself but this will lead you to solve everything that's wrong with this printer. I had to make a lot of improvements ontop of that to make sure that it prints reliably but now I have hundreds of hours and 4 spools of successful prints.

I can now print, high quality, low quality, fast, slow... all of it just works!

I cut through my printer's insides up to improve the setup and now it works as it should.

(the saddest thing is the original manufacturers could have made this happen and it would have been a much better experience overall as a consumer product but it was poorly designed. - I'm just glad now my printer is rock solid)

There are no more cooling issues and now everything prints much more reliably.

Those seem to be the defaults in the SD Press profile for slic3r.

Do you suggest lowering the retraction speed and figuring out what works?

I've switched over from a white SD Press filament to a black one.

So what exactly is the issue? Well, the printer manages to print the skirt and first layer walls, but when it goes to print the first bottom layer of the raft, a very tiny amount of plastic comes out. You can see this in the bottom corner of the attached image.

• I've cleaned out the feed gear, it has had black filament powder on it a few times.

• I originally thought the nozzle was clogged, but I've attempted to unclog via purging with an allen key.

• I've re-aligned the feed gear.

• I've tightened the feed gear.

The problem still persists. I've printed with this black filament before in the past with no problems, so I'm hesitant to think it's that. If it is the filament, could it be from it not being completely dry?

The filament has been getting gouged out pretty drastically, and it seems to be only occurring when the printer retracts the filament a little bit, since I can extrude larger lengths of filament out without any extrusion issues.

The bed offset has been standard across my prints, and shouldn't have changed, so I don't think this is the issue either.

Any ideas on potential ways to carry out fixes? I'm not sure what else I can check out. Any comments would be appreciated.

Edit:

I should add I'm printing at between 100-105C on the bed, and 230C on the extruder.