I’ve hit up support, but am writing here in case anyone has any ideas tonight.
The short of it is my print head is completely jammed on a piece of PLA filament. The little feeder gear ground a piece of filament to bits (and likely shoved all those bits down the hole). When I tried to pull it back out, the filament broke off in my hand, leaving only a tiny little nub (not big enough to grab).
I tried shoving it back down the hole, but it won’t budge. I tried removing the nozzle but that didn’t help either. By probing around, it seems like the jam is above the top of the hot end, but below the feeder hole.
Advice?
Your printer was tested by printing an ABS octopus. If this is the first time you have printed something, there may very well be some leftover ABS in the barrel.What I would to is heat the extruder hot end to 240 degrees c, then use a piece of fillament to manually press the melted fillament out. If that doesn’t work you can try extremely carefully drilling a small hole in the center of the broken off fillament, then screwing a tiny screw into the fillament and using that as a handle to pull it out. Be aware if you do that wrong you can damage your hot end, short it out and shock yourself, etc.
PLA tends to swell when it gets hot. If the cooling fan on the extruder body isn’t running for whatever reason, it may be wedgeing itself into the bore. You may want to check that as well.
Just to close the loop on this. Since I bought the printer with Amazon Prime, they took it back and next day’ed me a new one. The new printer is printing very well.