Extrusions issues (clogged heatbrake?)
Hi,
First off I wanted to say hello, as this is my first post here 🙂 Unfortunately it's not a happy one 🙁
I'm having a problem with extrusion. My guess is the heat break got clogged. I started having some extrusion problems after I bought orange filamentum PLA from prusa shop. By all the reviews I assumed it will be great, but couldn't get a single print to stick to the build plate (both PEI and textured). After about 10-15 attempts I just gave up. It was a bit of a surprise as I was able to print even some 2 year old PLA that I put in the oven at 100*C (which messed it up). The extrusion was a bit inconsistent, but the stuff still printed rather well (all things considered). The filamentum PLA was the only one I ever had problems printing with (I used amazon basics, PrimaValue, the one I got with MK3S, Tinmory).
This is how the prints look like now (0.4 nozzle, 0.3 layer height):
And how they looked before (0.6 nozzle, 0.4 layer height):
Soon after those problems started I decided to swap the nozzle and I made a rookie mistake while doing so. Heated up the nozzle to 285*C without performing a cold pull. I'm assuming that must have fried the PLA inside the heat brake and clogged it. Today I tried to clean the heatbrake using an SMD rework heat gun and a little wire thingy I bought for cleaning the nozzle (photo below):
I think I did managed to clean up most of it as I could clearly see through the heatbrake, but it might not have been enough. Below you can see the results of all the cold pulls I did. One extra thing I tried was to only screw in half the heatbrake into the heatsink thinking that this might move the heated area a bit up and thus allow the stuck filament to melt and be pulled out with a cold pull - didn't help.
The amount of filament left after the cold pull (grey pushed out by orange):
And how the heatbrake and nozzle look like after all those cold pulls (the nozzle is fresh out of the box, the only print I did with it are those 2 boxes in the first image):
My question is whether I'm right about the heatbrake? And if so, which one would be better to buy, the original V6 or the prusa version? I do not have the MMU (yet) and I read the prusa version is specifically designed for the MMU and some people recommended switching to the original if not using the MMU.
Pls help 🙂