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Aug 2017

Greetings all! Was printing up a circuit box for a friend’s Raspberry Pi kit. Said print should have taken close to four hours. I left it alone after it started alright, but when I checked on it a couple of hours later the plastic had all wrapped around the heating element and nozzle! It’s a solid chunk now and if I try to pull on it, it just moves the entire printing head. I have a Monoprice PN15365 printer. This was only my third print (have two of the cats test prints that come with the printer). I bought the machine new, even though its an older model. Any advice will be greatly appreciated! Sign-- Wacky

Welcome to the club! :slight_smile:

While it looks frightful, that kind of mess is pretty easy to clean off. Heat up the

hot end, maybe 150c and pull the plastic off with a pair of needle-nosed pliers.

It comes off fairly easy.

But… it might be a good time to pick up a spare hot end assembly. You

can get E3D clones for under twenty dollars. It’s a good idea to keep a spare

hot end.

Good luck!

In the end I decided to skip the heat gun idea; I first tried the blow dryer at maximum power, but it didn’t do much. It DID show that the air when everywhere and I couldn’t control it. Next I tried my hot knife for cutting styrofoam. It was marginally successful, so I moved to a soldering iron at 16 watts. That was better but still not enough. In the end I went with a 25 volt soldering iron and that was much more effective. As the filament bubbled and smoked (lots of smoke, used an air filter next to the printer to keep in all in check), the plastic changed where the tip went but didn’t melt. After it cooled I could pull a good portion off by hand. After an hour’s worth of work I had half of it gone. I plan on removing the second half later today and giving it another test print. Thanks for the advice about the aluminum foil–that’s a great idea for future projects where I need to use something hot in a confined area.