Hello,
I’m having some issues with my printer head, there have been a two failed prints where it appears that the filament isn’t adhering to the print bed and ends up with a tangled mess moving round with the print head, after the second time it did this I noticed that inside the printer head in between the fan bracket and the aluminium bit it was filled with filament. The problem is that now I have disassembled it I can’t remove the fan bracket as the filament has acted like an adhesive so it’s stuck to the aluminium top piece. Hopefully the attached images make the situation clear.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can get this PLA out of the printer head cavity, iv’e heard caustic soda would dissolve the PLA but I don’t want to use it on the aluminium/ brass.
And if I heat the head up to try and remove it would just burn my hand
2 Likes
Xeno
August 25, 2015, 1:04pm
3
Maybe this will help, someone with the same problem
https://ultimaker.com/en/community/view/16174-is-my-ultimaker-done-for-good
and it seems heat is your best solution, a hot hair-dryer, and good gloves, soften the PLA, to able to take it all apart, and use pliers to remove the softened PLA
and be careful not to break anything
I had issues with my print heat jamming so I heat it up and push a drill thru .015 drill for .4 tip some times I just load and reload filament and that works I really don’t like the filament feeder on the ultimate good luck
Sunlof
August 25, 2015, 3:52pm
5
Hello,
Maybe you can try to disassemble the ptfe coupler and the rear fan and then heat up the nozzle. It should heat the aluminium plate as well and you will certainly be able to unstuck the fan bracket.
Try to be specially careful with the pt100 sensor. It is quite fragile.
Hello Dan,
PLA starts to become flexible at 50 or 60 degrees Celsius, so just heat the head to that temperature and try to unscrew it
success Eric
So the root of the problem is the nozzle was not tight to the feed tube so it leaked out when printing. I had this happen to my nozzle on my Replicator 2.
First go through an unload cycle to get the filament out of the inside of the nozzle, then while the nozzle is still hot take a needle nose plier and unscrew the nozzle from the bottom, if it get harder to remove, you will have to apply the heat again. Once the nozzle is off, you will have to take the assembly apart to clean out the PLA that is inside the sheetmetal housing around the nozzle.
I have the same printer. I would heat the assembly just enough (Heat gun or in the oven) to soften the PLA. Use gloves and try using wood toothpicks to clear out material enough to disassemble…
