Jonathan Dowland: My Prusa Mini+ is broken

my prints kept turning into gunge

View of heatblock, with snapped nozzle

Oh dear! I’ve been suffering print reliability issues on my Prusa
Mini+ for quite a while, roughly since they introduced Input Shaping
(although that might not be the culprit). Whilst trying different
things to resolve it, I managed to sheer off the brass nozzle within
the heatblock. I now have half the nozzle stuck in the ratchet spanner,
and half in the heatblock.

What to do next?

I can try and get the nozzle out of the heatblock, by screwing something
into it or using an extraction
screw. I’ve been warned this could be messy and dangerous.
Less risky might be to change out the whole heatblock. They don’t seem
to be expensive.

Back in FOSDEM I asked the Prusa folks what cool projects
I could do with the Mini+… they looked a little blank (I think the Mini+
is now a somewhat forgotten product) but they did say somebody had managed
to port over the “Nextruder” from the more recent Prusa XL/MK4. I could
take a look at that.

Another thing I’ve always wanted to explore (although I had intended it to
be temporary/reversible) was converting it into a plotter, for plotter
art.

Somehow this is my first 3d printing blog post in over a year. The
printables.com feed I linked to is still going,
I’m happy to report (as is the one I wrote but didn’t publish, slightly
more surprisingly)