Filament stops extruding after a while

I just got my ROBO 3D printer a few days ago, and am brand new to 3D printers.

I'm having a lot of issues with filament in general. I've managed to print a few small objects (pic attached) and they've been pretty perfect and very accurate. However every time I try to print something of higher volume the filament fails to be laid down correctly or just stops being extruded at all.

You can see in my other photo that on this one even the first layer failed. I've done two other objects of similar size that both stopped extruding after 5-10 layers. On this one after failing to complete the first layer, the extruder seems to be putting out hardly any filament.



To get the filament to extrude again, I have had to often put a wire in to move whatever's in the tube near the nozzle, then am able to get it going for a random length of time before it stops again. The times that it failed on 5-10 layers, it seems to have grinded the filament and pulling it out sometimes shows a kink in the filament (pic attached).



I'm using white 1.75mm filament, temperatures between 180-200, and I've had the heated bed at 50c as it seems to help the first layers stay put. The filament is held in place as tightly as I can get it to.

Any ideas what my issue is? Kinda sad that I can barely get anything to print so far!

 

Whoops, I don't know how I missed the material off. It's PLA.

I turned the heated bed on as a number of people have recommended a low temperature specifically for PLA. A number of my first prints became unstuck without the heated bed. Nothing's become unstuck since using the heated bed on a low temperature.

I followed all the instructions in the manual for leveling, and as shown in one of the photos I've had successful prints. That doesn't seem to address the main problem, which is filament isn't extruding.

 

So I just tried printing another model and filament stopped extruding after 3 or so layers. I undid the bolts as you said and was unable to push the filament through manually. However, after about a minute I tried pushing again and did see filament coming through, so it seems like it needed the manual push to be able to keep going.

 

It was 190c for first layer and 180c for 2nd+ as recommended in the manual.

 

Hey tesseract, I did a couple of test prints.

First, I started with a small calibration cube in the material robo3d supplied as well as the filament I bought. Both of these worked fine, but were short, simple prints. I wanted to attempt to rule out the filament I bought being an issue.

I then tried something more complex ( http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:152484 ), and basically had to babysit the entire thing. Every layer or two it would stop extruding filament, but since I was sitting watching it the entire time, I would just apply downward pressure to the filament and it would continue printing just fine! This seems to indicate that there's a general issue with the filament actually being pulled through. It works for a while, anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes, then just fails to pull any more until I manually add pressure for it to do so.

 

This might also be your filament isn't a consistent diameter perhaps. Or maybe your extruder isn't able to apply enough pressure... do you have the screws tightened in util they stop? Perhaps add a spacer if your springs aren't heavy enough, or use stiffer springs? The 1.75mm filament is pretty small stuff. Tolerances don't allow for a lot of variation in the filament itself so perhaps that's the problem???