Hello all,
I have an urgent question. I was calibrating my extruder today and noticed that at regular intervals, no filament was being pulled into the hotend when I set it to extrude 100mm. Since it was so regular, I imagined that it must be that some of the teeth on the gear on the extruder are faulty somehow. I’ve had my printer, the Anet A8, for about four months and have been printing on the weekends, so it hasn’t seen that much use. I’ve been very careful with it and haven’t noticed any other problems with the extruder until this one. I haven’t opened it up to assess the gear yet because it’s late here and I’m pretty tired, but does that explanation make sense for what I am observing? If so, how do I fix it?
I’ll make sure I update my situation when I investigate further tomorrow. Thanks!
Soooo… The extruder gears are not clogged and everything looks pretty clean. I was printing at a higher speed, so I think it might have just been that the hotend wasn’t able to heat up the plastic fast enough. I’ll try that next.
Problem solved! It was the temperature. I was printing faster without raising the temperature and that caused the extruder gear to get clogged. Afterwards, it wasn’t biting into the filament when I was testing the calibration. Re-calibrated and printed a calicat with no problems.
@Broken_Prop , I am TERRIBLY sorry – your post got caught in our filter. G+ has been so inundated with spam that I have to approve new posts and it took me a day or two to get to this one. I’ve approved you as an always-approved user, so this shouldn’t happen next time. I promise we’re a pretty responsive community normally. 
I gotcha. It was a simple problem anyways; if I just had gone ahead and cracked open extruder I would have seen the problem! Heard lots of good things about this community.