Clicking sound when extruding

Hi All!

I have a Prusa I3 replica from China. ( I know... It's my foult...!) So, when I print something from PLA filament - 210 C° - and the print speed is bigger than 40mm/s, I always hear something clicking sound from the extruder. I have observed when I have hear this sound, the extuder motor is jumping one to back. It is not able to feed the material. If I decrease the speed to 30mm/s everything's okay, but I think, this speed is too small and it should print with higher speed.

I have tried to calibrate the stepper driver. Theoretically, to the motor need 2.8V, I have measured the voltage at the stepper driver, but there are only 0.8V. I can increase this voltage to 1.6V - this is the maximum -, but if I make this, the motor does not work good. It has terrible sound, and the movement is lumpy - not continuous -. May did I do something in a bad way?

Could someone give any advice?

Thanks! Sorry for my bad English!

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/24/2016 03:31PM by GSchk86.

Chinese hotend, Chinese speed.....

30mm/sec is decent for a cheap printer, upgrade both hotend and extruder to gain speed but don't know what quality you will get?

Try to tighten the idle bearing of the extruder and see if it helps.

Probably the clicking is due to the extruder motor skipping, which in turn is due to clogging/jamming in the hot end, which may be due to a number of issues.

Try reducing your temperature... 210 is quite hot for PLA; I print it at 190. Too much heat causes the PLA to soften and bend and jam in the hot end.

Does manual extrusion (using software control, with the nozzle clear of the bed) work OK? If your nozzle is too close to the bed, it causes back-pressure and clogging.

Have you measured the thickness of the filament... nominally 1.75mm filament may vary by +/-10%. If it's thicker, then you'll get over-extrusion which causes back-pressure.

You can (mostly) ignore the voltage specification of the motors, the thing you need to take note of is the current rating. The voltage on the potentiometer of the stepper driver is a reference voltage used to set the current limit that the driver will drive into the stepper motor. You want to set the reference voltage to a value that's calculated to give around 70 to 80 % of the motors rated current. More info on how to calculate the reference voltage for a given current at the following link: [reprap.org]

Hello, i´m kinda new to all this, i've recently built my repstrap. I bought an E3D v6 (clone i think) already assembled, first thing i did, even before first print attemp, is disassemble it to understand how it works, when i reassembled it, i put the heat break and the heat sink too close to the aluminium block. The result was that i didn't have an effective heat break, causing PLA to jam all the time. While troubleshooting i saw a video from Tom Sarlander explaining how to correctly assemble the hotend; followed instructions, and got no more jamming issues.
What i mean with my boring story, is to check the heatbreak.

Check your hotend temperature with a multimeter with a thermocouple directly into the nozzle to make sure you really trying to extrude at 210C and its not more in the 160 ish range, I have extrusion problem similar to your , turn out the thermistor was OFF 200C was in fact 165C ish I was able to extrude but that require a lot of pressure coming from the extruder, going a little faster and the extruder was not about to give enough.

If its not the temperature it could be many thing , extruder not enough current, badly assemble hotend, you must try each solution one by one until you find the problem.