Anyone happen to know why this happens? Usually my prints start out fine and then a little ways through it just starts leaving blobs everywhere. I did have to turn my flow rate down though because my filament kept skipping if it’s any higher than 70%. Could that somehow be the issue?
Heat creep. Your hot end is allowing too much heat to build up further and further up. Cool off the upper portion of your hot end. You could also try printing a little cooler, or (I looked at some of your past posts) maybe putting some thermal paste between the heat break and the heat sink? Higher flow fan? Generally this is the cause of time-based extrusion issues.
100% agree with @ThantiK Seen this many times before.
@ThantiK @Griffin_Paquette so here’s the weirdest thing… I started printing this and the first layer was a little rough but I was tweaking some settings while it was running so I could visually see what was happening. I upped the temp to 210, the flow to 100% and the speed to 135% and now it’s working. The extruder isn’t making that “thud” noise anymore and it’s actually flipping printing! Slowly but surely as it prints additional layers it’s filling in the problems of the first layer and it’s not looking too bad! I’m going to let this run if it keeps going like this and see what happens. But if all is good, I may have finally found some usable settings. Fingers crossed!
@Kevin_Danger_Powers , the thing is - cold filament also acts as a heatsink in its own right. The heater has to dump heat into the material in order to get it soft enough to print. You might actually be solving the problem by simply sucking away enough heat by going faster.
@ThantiK that could be. Makes sense. I’m trying to print a lamp. Lol. Leave it to me to try and print shit when it’s not even ready. Lol. I guess that’s kinda how I live my life, just do it and figure it out along the way.
Cool down your nozzle with a fan or something
I second @ThantiK . Moving slower to fix extrusion problems is not always improving things. As an extreme, filaments like CFPLA (black PLA with small carbon fibers) conducts heat so well that I originally failed with speeds below 60mm/s (usually 75 mm/s and never an issue, which is quite nice). When the filaments start melting “too high” in the heating block, viscosity increases significantly which impedes the flow, until the hobbed bolt starts to slip and you get under extrusion.
When I first started 3D printing I had an awful Chinese J-head clone in a K-Extruder and heat creep would cause this regularly. It nearly put me off forever but several upgrades to the business end of my machine and later a whole extra printer has massively improved my prints. Why not get one of those all metal hotends.
ahh that makes sense, running pla on an e3dv6 I was having this issue, I put my extrusion multiplier to 2 that seemed to fix it.
@Jeremy_G_WeisTek_Eng I also had issues with under width cheap filament oozing back up the heat break requiring me to strip the thing down until I stopped buying that nasty rubbish.
@Duncan_Gunn ya I had to do this to 9ur prusa i3 mk2 at work… as well as mine at home.
Bad tension on the filament, I’ve been there. Print a cube without you touching anything, it will look bad. Now print another one only this time you gently assist the filament into the extruder, assist meaning you can actively push or you can just pinch a bit of filament ~4cm from the hole of the extruder arm and put your weight of your arm onto it. Either way you should be able to feel the motors little steppings, if you don’t then there’s something wrong with the motor its self. If assisting doesn’t work you can try adjusting the current you give the motor because more torque can push more filament through, but it’s a bit of a long shot-normally current is set fine by the factories.
@JuicyMoose_Productio I don’t think tension is the issue. The more questions I ask and the more things I try, I’m really starting to lean towards the heat creep that some people have mentioned. Pressing the filament into the extruder doesn’t help at all. I think it’s really just the shitty cooling design allowing the heat to get up too high.
@Kevin_Danger_Powers yeah then that does sound like heat creep. I go based off of common issues so I apologize for that. Have you made sure the fins are facing the correct side for the heat sink that’s practically sandwiched in the extruder?
@JuicyMoose_Productio yes, I have it facing the right way. If I flipped it around it wouldn’t fit back together. I do appreciate any info though. I’m still a noob to 3D printing so really anything could be an issue. So far I have worked out most of the bugs except for the heat creep and tweaking a few settings here and there. Things like thicknesses and speeds probably need to be tweaked a bit. I just learned about supports and filling in blank spots the other day.
I recommend watching some 3d printing tricks by Angus over at Makers Muse, he is quite informative about printing and also some troubleshooting. Please be sure to come back to us with any issue big or small and we’ll get you shaped up for printing in no time! 
@JuicyMoose_Productio will do and people here have been very helpful. Hopefully I’ll be able to show off some stuff soon enough. I work as a mechanical design engineer and have all the tools to design pretty much whatever I want so I’m excited to make some neat stuff.