Today I turned on a print, and went down stairs for about 10 minutes.
When I came back, I saw that my printer was still going, but that nothing was coming out of the nozzle.
When I inspected the hobbed bolt, it was full with pieces of ground up plastic and it had almost eaten through the strand of 3mm ABS.
Then, I disassembled the whole extruder, and after some effort, unscrewed the nozzle.
I saw that the plastic was stuck in the cold side of the heat break, and stuck to the walls.
I tried everything! I heated the nozzle to max 315 degrees C, and stopping the cold end fan, hoping that the radiant heat would melt the plastic enough to pull it out, but this didn’t work.
Also, I tried pushing and pulling the filament with pliers with and without the nozzle @300 degrees, and it didn’t work either.
Is it an all metal hotend (E3D, hexagon, etc…) or a classic J-head with black plastic?
If it is an all metal one, then you can simply put the whole hotend assembly to the oven at 250°C.
A friend of mine had other issues, and had to save his hotend regularly this way.
If this doesn’t do the trick, then you may try to put it all over a flame of some kind, and let the melted plastic flow from it.
Hey I have a cut piece of metal coat hanger I use to unclog most problems. Heat it up to 260 or so and force the clog thru from the top … Only have had once it hasn’t worked and upon taking the hot end off I was able to remove with pliers . Note I do have a all metal makerfarm hexagon hotend Give it a shot.
Yeah but he said the plastic was stuck on the sides of the heat break, so I think the “normal heating” will not be able to melt all the solid plastic. He needs to melt higher up.
In the title it says that I have an all metal E3D v5 (should be a v6), but that’s okay.
I tried to bomb it by heating it to max 315, but it didn’t work!
I am just returning it to the company I bought it from, and let them repair it, because I see now that the heater cardridge has also been damaged.
The company even said when I bought it that there would be a v6 on it, but they put a v5 on it (I recognized this when I looked at some assembly videos).
