I was trying to print this hinged box and stupidly left the room before the first layer was put down. Note that there is no left side to the box. I think it was all wrapped around my nozzle.
Cleaned the gunkwad of PLA off and now it looks like:
Any tips on getting this PLA off the nozzle?
I had PLA on the nozzle, but not on the heater block. I heated it up to PLA temperature, and took a cotton rag (old t-shirt) folded over many times to protect me from the heat, wetted it with some acetone, and the melted PLA wiped off pretty easily. For the heater block around the heater and sensor you might try a q-tip type swab also wetted with acetone. I’m not sure that the acetone did a lot of good, but it seemed to work better than a dry rag. Good luck!
A wire brush works really well too.
Make sure to power down the printer before you start cleaning it , to reduce the risk of shorting anything out.
I wound up being able to get it pretty much all off just using the tweezers. I heated it up to about 175C, then let it cool a bit. At that point, the PLA was soft but tacky enough that it would prefer to pull off all of it rather than separate. Had to do it a couple of times (following Orias’ suggestion to avoid any even more horrible things happening). But now I have 91% IPA and 100% acetone for other stuff. I went ahead and gave the bed a thorough cleaning.
PLA comes right off the extruder nozzle at 209c with the wipe of several dry Q-tips while the tip is still hot so you don’t burn yourself, the PLA gets sucked up by the Q-tip and is really easy to remove the Q-tip gets into the hard to reach places on the buddaschnozzle and can fully wipe off the nozzle when hot.
Well, the biggest problem wasn’t the part on the nozzle so much as the parts in all the nooks and crannies. It melts and hangs out on the heater block “shelf”. I finally got it out using the tweezers while it was heated just enough to be tacky.
The though occurs that maybe I could have heated it up enough to run and then tilted the printer at an angle, allowing it to run off the top of the block and down.