Filament not feeding but no jam is present
Recently my printer has developed some extrusion issues. The printer jams on most prints. Some prints succeed, but the only thing I found linking successful prints together was that the extruder idler was very over tightened, and even then not all prints with that were successful.
This started when I was attempting to improve the surface quality of some benchy's and I found that the Bondtech idler was tightened too much, the end of the screw protruded about 1-1.5 mm past the nut. Several weeks earlier I had found that if it was any looser the printer would have intermittent extrusion issues. Prusa released a video (Idler tension is mentioned at 0:52) talking about improving print quality and mentioned it should not be tightened much past the point where the gears can push the filament or else print quality could suffer. The idler in my printer was tightened much past that so I tried loosening it. Loosening the idler only caused the printer to jam. The printer would start extruding normally, the first layer usually printed without issue. Around the 2nd or 3rd layer the clicking noises would begin and the printer would stop extruding. At first I thought it was a jam or blockage somewhere in the filament path but I was able to unload and load the filament without any issue. After that I thought the nozzle I was using might have been the issue but I replaced it with another 0.4 nozzle and I still had the same issues. I completely disassembled and rebuilt the hotend (following the matterhackers e3d v6 assembly tutorial) multiple times looking for issues. The only possible issues I found was that the heatbreak and nozzle had an issue screwing into the heater block past a certain point and appeared to not be completely in contact inside of the heatblock but the blockage was removed and they both fit correctly afterwards. I also found that the heatbreak seemed to be a little loose fitting in the heaterblock but proper tightening seemed to fix that issue. While the extruder was disassembled I checked the bearing in the bondtech gears, the alignment of the gears, and the status of the teflon tube, there were no issues with any of those. I'm printing with amazon basics PLA, a 0.4 hardened steel nozzle, and .15 quality setting. I also replaced the included heatbreak with a standard e3d v6 heatbreak.
I had a nearly identical issue a little less than a year ago. I found then that I could print at 230c and prevent jams but that approach did not work this time. I don't know what resolved the actual issue the first time as it just stopped one day without an interference on my part.
I checked many other threads trying to solve this problem but none of them were able to resolve this issue. Any help is appreciated.
Edit- Forgot to mention the extruder gears do not stop turning when the issue occurs