I came into the office this morning to find my machine completely crashed. The entire head is covered in PLA+ like molten lava. I’ve never had something this bad happen to any machine. I’ve only had the machine 10 months. Any pointers on recovering from this, besides ordering a new one? I do have a spare heater block/nozzle kit, but I’m not sure how extensive the damage is here. the blobs of plastic are too big to get cutters around. The heater block seems to be trapped on the head. The heater and temp wire are definitely trapped. I’m think I’m going to have to put a saw blade on my dremel and see if I can make a dent in it. ANY SUGGESTIONS HERE?
A few hours later, finally fixed.
Drilled .195” holes thru the solid chucks so I could hang onto them with a skinny flat blade screwdriver. softened the mass with a heat gun. used a multi-tool to cut the large blobs off. Was finally able to access the damaged wires to the nozzle heater and connect them to a 24v power supply and heat the nozzle up from inside the blob and chunk by chunk got the blobs off, removing screws as they were exposed. Nozzle/heater block were completely toast (but I had a spare) and surprisingly not too much peripheral damage.
It’s back together and going through calibration. Wow! I can’t believe we got out of that crash without worse internal damage.
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Awesome to hear !
When I first saw those photos, I thought the hotend kit was done for 
!
Oh yeah, that hot end was toast. managed to get it out but not salvageable. had to replace nozzle, heater, heatsink, thermocouple, etc., but luckily I had a spare hot end kit. I was surprised the fan and circuit board were not damaged, but it was a close call.
My blob was not quite as bud but just as frustrating.
The cause of mine was the print became detached from the bed and stuck to the nozzle. I’ve since used more glue stick with PLA and not had a repeat of this in 600+ hours of printing.
Good move to heat the nozzle up with a 24V PS. I used a box cutter preheating the blade with a hot air gun to cut most of mine off.