I’ve had my Ender 3 v3 Plus for less than two weeks. Today, about halfway through printing a flexy rexy, my son said the rexy was stuck to the printer. I went to check. Saw some plastic on the brass extruder nozzle. Opened it up. Wow! Catastrophic failure internally. Hyper-PLA absolutely all over. Was able to remove the extruder unit (“heating block”?? whatever it’s called) from the printer. It’s a total loss. The PLA is solid. I can’t unscrew the hot end from the heat sink.
Is this a warranty issue?
I can’t seem to find a kit that sells the heatsink. I can find hot end kits all over, but no heat sink.
I don’t know even what to call this hardware.
This is fixable by heating the hotend and removing carefully the plastic. You may need the assistance of hotair gun or soldering iron. Be very careful of the wires. Once done you will need to see if the nozzle is tightened properly and that the heatbreak is also tight.
I don’t see how I can possibly heat that PLA plastic sufficiently to melt it without also damaging those wires. They are surrounded by the PLA.
hot air gun, its a turbo charged hair dryer, time and patience it will come off.
A hot air gun will melt the wiring, too. It might not be easy to see from those pics, but the wires are embedded in the plastic. I would have to cut the wires, put on a heat-shrink sleeve, solder them back together, and hope for the best. And then somehow clean out the innards of the filament feed tube and the heat sink.
Instead, I just called Creality (Creality Support <<< best support resource I’ve found yet). They said they will replace it under warranty.
Indeed it will if you are not careful. A whole new hotend is possibly easiest but make sure the new one has the nozzle properly tightened, I bought a 1.8Nm torque wrench for this.
I am considering getting a Micro Swiss after this.
Good call, I have that for my V3SE and V3KE and Ender 5 plus…it can still do blob of death if you don’t ensure all the screws and nozzles aren’t tightened correctly.