I’ve been having a terrible time with my drive gears getting clogged up. I’m using 3mm filament and have tried both the hobbed pulley from Trinity Labs and the Arcol Mini Hyena. I’ve tried loosening up the idler pulley but then the filament doesn’t have enough grip and skips.
Sounds like a problem with your hotend actually… Does not look like you have any cooling on the top part of it?
I have the same problem with the black hob from TL. It is directional too, so it grips better when turning counter clockwise than clockwise, but still gets clogged. I gave up with it and used an older silver one I had.
Clogging can also occur if you are trying to push filament too fast or the nozzle is not hot enough for the given filament.
You might want to focus on why your feed is generating so much resistance - either the hot end is not hot enough, or your filament is having too much drag from your spool to the drive gear. (Or both.)
Your nozzle might be clogged. I had a piece of Teflon tape come off and plug up a nozzle, but just a bit, enough so material would come out, but it took a lot of pressure and would often fail. I threw the nozzle on an electric burner on high for 20 minutes and burnt off all the plastic residue and used a pin to pull out the bit of tape.
Ya i would sway its not a drive gear problem. It likely a hotend problem.
As others said, back-pressure is the likely cause. Try cleaning your nozzle out using the instructions here: http://bukobot.com/nozzle-cleaning
I’m not sure what software you’re using but Makerware I can control the feed rate. Is it possible that the feed rate is set too high?