Yeah, it is sad.  We had a great relationship at first.  It was wonderful and vibrant.  I was learning a lot about printing and creating new designs left and right.  Then things changed.  I needed to do some maintenance and started stripping threads.  The cooling fan started to croak, and the hot-end died.  I spent a lot of time trying to fix it, but don’t want to throw any more money at it at this point.

Trying to open it up and grease all the rails was the first mistake.  I stripped some threads putting it back together.  I could be blamed for this, but I assemble a lot of equipment, and stripped threads are not common for me.  Once back together it seemed to be noisier than it was before.

Next the fan died and I spent a few iterations trying to get a good fan on there.  Unfortunately they don’t sell replacement anything, nor do they have specs online.  I got a good fan installed, but my print quality never really recovered.

Benchy on the left had blobs and a lot of strings, but at least he finished.  Benchy on the right looked worse and never finished because of a nozzle jam.

I did a few rounds of clearing the nozzle jam, reloading filament, and then having another print jam.  I took apart the hot end section a few times.  The threads were starting to get bad on the nozzle, and the parts are held in with a very cheap set screw.  The upper brass piece accepts the boden tube.  It is a threaded tube fitting that just has a set screw pushed against it.  Not a robust design.  The threads get all messed up, and it doesn’t hold well.  After my 3rd or 4th jam, it jammed again, and kicked the boden fitting off entirely.  I came home to this.

Thankfully it only chewed up a few meters of material, but I am frustrated.  From my reading, I likely have damage in the PTFE lining of my heat break.  I tried drilling it out a little, and cleaned up the nozzle, but still got jams.  I don’t know what the issue is, I am using gcode that worked fine a few weeks ago.  It is time for a new hot end, but I am done throwing money at this hunk of junk.  At least it taught me what I need to know to make an informed decision on my next printer purchase.