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I’ve been printing for several hours worth of time now; most all of my prints have been turning out perfect after a couple months of troubleshooting. As a result of having printed for a while, lots of burnt filament has thinly crusted the outside of my extruder. Very recently, my first layers are seeming to stick to the nozzle, causing curling and forcing me to kill my print. I would imagine then that the extruder is overly contaminated.

To start off with cleaning, I want to simply clear away all the burnt crust on the nozzle, but I don’t know where to begin. I’ve (pretty much) tried scraping it with the edge of a knife, but that would take practically forever. Are there any household chemicals like nail polish remover that I could wipe it away with?

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Depends on what filament you used to print with. If it’s ABS then acetone should wash it off. Other filaments not so much.

I typically find that heating the nozzle up to just above print temp for the material I was printing with, folding a few layers of white roll and quickly wiping the nozzle with it works well. I’d wear gloves if you are worried about burning yourself.

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Thanks for the suggestion. It’s ABS, so I’ll have to check and see if I have any acetone in stock :slight_smile:

I had tried nail polish-remover on a q-tip with absolutely no result, then I heated the nozzle to about 160C and scrubbed it with fine steel wool, and that worked pretty well. I’ll have to try acetone though.

Thanks again!

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If it is abs then you should just soak the nozzle in it overnight

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I was looking into various options of cleaning it, and I didn’t want to actually take the nozzle off. I figure there’s more calibration required when you put it back on. Scrubbing it works fine.

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Enhance the temperature to 210 and brush the nozzle exterior witha copper brush and use a thick cloth to remove smaller parts of burned filament!

always have two nozzles as spare. To reduce filamant lose enhance retraction to make sure there is no filament dripping away during printing!

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Thanks for the suggestion; I’ll definitely look into modifying my retraction settings, because I haven’t changed it from factory settings default.

I’ll see if I can find myself a copper brush!

Thanks again!

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Curling on a nozzle is not a bad thing, although you will read all kinds of folks fighting it. When you are printing, it will lay down just fine…

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I use a dremel tool with a wire brush attachment. Cleans everything off and leaves a nice shine behind.

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Oh, sweet! I use the dremel right in that same room.

Thank you!