Filament being chewed

Hi all, I'm new to 3D printing and the Robo 3D R1 (purchased Sept 2014) and have spent a good time on these forums reading and working through issues but currently am a bit stuck and am hoping this awesome community might have a few suggestions.

So the issue I am currently struggling with is the filament being chewed up and not feeding. It seems to work just fine prior to the print but during the print it just does not extrude. I have the newer R1 with the hexagon hotend, I have tried a few suggestions from the forums - seasoning the hotend, upgrading the hobbed bolt, adjusting the spring screws (not certain that is the official name), and adjusted the temperature. I have ordered the e3d v6 hotend but that is not due until next week.

I am using Repetier Host with mostly default settings, extruder is set to 205 degrees and I am printing with Hatchbox PLA as I could not get the Robo filament to work at all.

Please let me know if this is duplicate thread or posted in the wrong section.

Thanks in advance for the support.

 

Can you take a picture from directly above? From two of those pics it looks like the hobbed teeth may be too far to the right, but the angle could be throwing it off.
That needs to be dead center of the filament inlet.

It may help to slow your infill down a bit too. The faster you run, the hotter you need to be to keep up, plus other factors as well. It's all about finding that sweet spot.

 

Not great shots but hopefully you can tell if it's off center. From my perspective it looks off slightly but I'm concerned adding a washer will over compensate. I will certainly try tweak the infill, thanks!

 

From those angles it looks pretty good. Shouldn't need to mess with that.
Any time I see grinding it one of these things for me...

Temp too low
nozzle too low
flow rate too fast
speed too high
Spring screws not tight enough
minor clog from higher temp materials still sticking in there
spool binding
or bending below the hobb teeth. (flexy filament)

Many of those work together to either cause the grinding, or one may need to be adjusted to prevent it.

 

Your spring screws look too tight to me.

 

About how far through the nut should they be, do you think?

 

You just need enough pressure for it to grip the filament. Tell it to free extrude and loosen it out until it starts to slip, then just a bit tighter than that should be fine.

 

Perfect, will try that. Thanks Mike

 

Axis and Mike thank you both for your help, I was able to adjust the z-offset and that seemed to fix the extrusion issue at least in MatterControl. I cannot seem to get the z-offset working but adjusting the g-code in Repetier though, any reason why that doesn't work?

I have adjusted this multiple times with no apparent change in nozzle height.

G1 Z1 ;Raise nozzle 1mm for offset