How to unclog a clogged extruder?
I'm sure this is not the best solution, and if you have some ethyl acetate you should try that before going "the hard way".

Ethyl acetate is a solvent for PLA, so if you soak the extruder into it PLA should melt and free the extruder.

That said, this is the "hard" solution that worked for me.



You'll need:


A drill
A 1mm drill bit
A 1.5mm drill bit


Insert the 1mm drill bit into the drill. If your drill has a setting to reduce the drilling speed, take this to the minimum speed. If your drill doesn't have such options, you'll need to push the drill button very gently.

Put the drill bit on the pla block (be sure to not touch the cooling block, you might ruin it). Start drilling at the minimum speed and push very gently, until you get a side-to-side hole on the PLA (you know it because you feel no resistance at all while pushing the drill).

Take the 1.5mm drill bit and repeat the same operation. At this point my PLA block literally exploded (now I have some broken PLA inside my room, don't know where) and the extruder was finally free.

I hope this helps someone. Please notice that you need to be very gentle in order to avoid breaking parts of your extruder, but if I managed to do it, you can do it too ;)

As previously said, if you have ethyl acetate try soaking the extruder into it to make PLA dissolve before trying this. Try this solution only if all other options didn't help.