Does anyone have any suggestions on how to clean this mess of pla off my flashforge creator pro nozzle? And is it important to replace the kepton ceramic tape?
Preheat the nozzle using the menu, then slowly pick away at the gooey plastic bits. If you do it carefully, there would be no damage to the kapton tape, though replacing it should be easy.
Hi there, sure you can heat it up and “get most of it off” but I would also second taking the time to clean it and replace the kapton.
I recently re-made the insulation methodically, adding 3 layers of them (one layer then cutting holes where parts fit, then another one perpendicular, then again). Good insulation in conjuction with good nozzle duct (I have a circular one) makes perfect prints. The duct cannot pull temperature down because of good insulation, so there is no duct inducted clogging, and I believe that in such scenario, with a good duct (this is mine: Active Cooling Fan Duct v2 for Replicator 1 / Duplicator 4 / FlashForge / CTC by thruit00 - Thingiverse ), you will never have to “clean such a mess” anymore 
Warning, if you loosing the set screw holding the thermal barrier to the square bar resetting the level can be a PIA or because of FlashForge’s poor design using a set screw on the barrier it can become jammed in the hole and essientially not removable.
Personally I didn’t like the design so I milled my own carrier bar to support E3D chimera barriers and hotends.
Dhin
5
Looking at this images I have to say, WOW. That is a good gunking you’ve got there. That plastic was liquefied onto that head! I won’t ask what temperature you were trying to print at because it was really too high.
So my suggestion is to heat the head (200 degree C range, melting the PLA) and take off as much as you can with just a piece of regular printer paper, but that will only work on the bits that get hot enough around the head. For the rest you are going to have be more careful. Put your print head on the bed and preheat it to 100 or so. This should loosen up and soften most of the plastic bits in contact with the bed. Pick out the plastic with needle nose pliers slowly so you don’t snag of stress the wires too much, use an model knife around areas that aren’t too close to the wires.
When you are done you will need to replace that isolation, but maybe not the Kapton it is more just thermal adhesive to hold the isolation in place more than anything else.
Thanks everyone. I heated it up and it all came off really easy with a paper towel. I’ll replace the ceramic kepton and it should be fine. I don’t know why this happened though. I was printing it at 210 like I do normally. And it was half way into a 20 hour print. I left it for a couple hours and came back to a giant blob. My guess is I got a partial clog that made the filament curl up and then it just kept printing into the blob and getting bigger. I don’t know how I could prevent that in the future besides keeping the nozzle clean and checking on it all the time.
Dhin
7
Good to hear that you got it cleaned off so easy. You do have to watch them closely, even 18 hours into a print it can still fail. My guess is you are getting some poor layer adhesion due to your print heat.That likely caused your print to get stringy and snag on the print head which was hot enough to melt the snags and start to form a build up on it. 210 is likely too high for most PLA, its optimal range is generally 190 to 200, I had some that needed 205 for a nice even flow but even on long prints I normally drop my temperature a few degrees since the heat loss between layers start to suffer even with active cooling going.
