Clogged extruder

It was bound to happen one day. Extruder in my 3D-printer clogged up and had to be cleaned.

After quick reading I found out that there is essentially two common ways to clear the extruder: Acetone bath and blowtorch. I'm not fond of playing with fire so I went for the first option. And I actually had acetone on my shelf - I needed it years ago with some lure painting experiments.

So down to jar of acetone the extruder went.

I don't know if PLA as material is more resistant to acetone than ABS, or if acetone I had was aged badly (bottle was easily more than ten years old), but it didn't do anything. So it was time to consider option number two again.

As it happens, I don't actually have a blowtorch. I do have a gas-powered (as in propane/butane, not gasoline) soldering iron but there was the aspect of fire, still.

Taking a look around I noticed my hot air blower. This is no hair dryer, no, even the low setting says 350 degrees Celcius and high setting apparently is more than 500 degrees C. Or so the label says at least.

It still isn't something one should play inside as pointing this thing towards wrong things might cause some serious damage (I use it mostly on low setting to shrink shrink-fit tubing.)  It actually came with this piece you could attach to the business end of it to limit air flow, but thata ctually melted (well, softened enough to become misshapen) the first time I used it. Great quality there (or maybe instructions said that it's only for low power setting - dunno, never did read them.)

So out I went, armed with pliers, side cutters, metal bowl (actually quite thin cover of metallic box that originally contained a small drill) and the blower.

And what do you know, this thing worked perfectly. It took less than half a minute for plastic to almost drop by itself from the extruder. After that it was time for another acetone bath, although I'm not sure if that actually did anything, but at least the printer is fine again.

Yes, that is wood there underneath. It's fine though as (long as) hot air isn't blown towards it, and extruder (only hot part in direct contact with metal bowl and thus indirectly wood) doesn't have sufficient thermal mass to even warm the wood. The white blob of PLA is actually just barely visible on the photo, right next to cutters' blades.

 Another nice way to clean the extractor. And I'd prefer this over the blow torch any day.