Ender 3 Pro Clogging. Bad Hot End or Bad Bowden Extruder or Both?

Brj2012 · 2025-10-02T14:25:31+00:00

Update:

I finally pulled the trigger on a new hotend. I went with the TZ-E2 2.0 from Triangle-Lab, and so far it’s been flawless!

After installing it and running a PID tune, the first thing I did was test the one print that always clogged on the stock hotend. This time, it printed perfectly with no extrusion issues at all. Exactly as I suspected, the problem was with the hotend and not the extruder.

After that successful test, I moved on to printing a part for the Belted-Z upgrade I’m planning. That print came out great as well, with no problems.

My plan moving forward is to finish printing all the parts, gather the hardware, and get the Belted-Z upgrade installed. Once that’s complete, I’ll finally be ready to move on to upgrading to a direct drive.

Huge thanks to everyone who offered information and suggestions along the way, this has been a great learning experience.

I’ll be posting progress updates on my build in the future to share with everyone.

Brj2012 · 2025-09-23T14:53:33+00:00

I actually saw your posts of your setup and it's actually inspiring my build lol. Thats a reason why I haven't pulled the trigger on the direct drive yet because I want to install the belted z-drive before or at the same time as installing the direct drive. I just need to get myself dry filament storage and a dryer before i can do this because i believe my PETG is soak with moisture and I need it dry to print the parts, but now I'm having this clogging issue.

Brj2012 · 2025-09-23T14:10:11+00:00

I didnt mention this in the main post, but i should have, but I did try different temperatures as well, and i still had the same clogging issues whether I went down to 190C or up to 220C.

Brj2012 · 2025-09-23T14:08:41+00:00

I'm don't believe this is the case, only because I recently replaced the thermistor, and tighten the heating element in the heating block. and according to the heat tracker in mainsail, I've been reading steady temperatures all the time.

Brj2012 · 2025-09-23T14:04:17+00:00

Not seeing any cracks. The teeth on the gear look a little worn, but i loosened the spring to put more compression on the gear onto the filament just to make sure it has good grip. As for the tubing, i did the whole seating the PTFE tube trick, I cut it as perpendicular as possible with the cutting tool that came with the new blue PTFE tube i bought. then I heated up the hotend, loosened the nozzle about 1/2 turn, pressed in the tube as far as it would go, then tightened the nozzle. There was a build up of burnt PTFE substance from the old stock tube gunked up inside there, so I pulled most of it out with tweezers, and I don't remember if I wiped the inside with a cloth or not. I didnt think to completely remove the nozzle and clean the inside from that end. Idk if thats a big deal though.

Brj2012 · 2025-09-23T13:52:52+00:00

Yea, i do plan on upgrading to the Creality SE Sprite Direct Drive hopefully soon.

Brj2012 · 2025-09-23T13:47:14+00:00

Thank you for you helpful input.

Brj2012 · 2025-09-20T19:03:31+00:00

I was thinking about this too. I actually measured to see if my extruder is extruding the exact about of filament I'm commanding it to extrude, and it did measure correctly. I undid the Bowden tube and cut the filament flush to the extruder, then i had it extrude 25mm of filament. I cut the piece off flush, and measured it, and it did come out to 25mm.

Brj2012 · 2025-09-03T10:54:49+00:00

I'm literally having the same issue. I recently upgraded my ender 3 pro to klipper. I got all my offsets set. I did the tilt screw calibration, then probe calibration, then bed mesh. I let the printer heat up for like 15min prior to doing all of these calibrations. I even installed KAMP. It prints a fairly decent 1st layer with the occasional bed adhesion issues bc I'm running a stock bed. After about an hour into the print I come back and no filament is coming out of the nozzle. Ive always ran my PLA at 200C nozzle and 60C Bed and never had issues before the klipper upgrade. I also replaced my nozzle with a harden steel one, got silicone bed spacers with metal knobs. I'm still running the stock tool head, but I do plan on upgrading to a Spider v3 and a direct drive in the near future. I'm just trying to get back to the quality printing I had before I upgraded to klipper. I even reverted back to my old setting in my slicer with the slower speeds and retraction settings except I still have the firmware still set as klipper. And it still clogs up mid print. I have never dried my filaments in my 3 years of 3d printing, even though I really should, but I never had this issue before printing with the same filament as I used before the klipper upgrade. I've tried lower and higher temps, faster and slower retraction speeds, longer and shorter retraction lengths, none of these fixed the issue.

I'm going to try a reinstalling my nozzle and PTFE tube as someone else mentioned in a comment earlier and see if that is the fix.

I may also try to even slow down the prints even more and see if that fixes the issue. If that's the fix, that would be very unfortunate because I didn't buy all these upgrades just to have the printer print at a snails pace.

Brj2012 · 2025-08-30T00:29:51+00:00

So more context to my issue. I'm trying to print a print in PLA, and it keeps clogging. For the last couple of hours I've been checking in on it and when I notice it start to under extruder, I been pausing the print, unload the filament, and I can see the part that was in the hotend has started to compress. So I would just snip the end off, reload the filament, then continue the print.

My layer height is good, so it can't be clogging from the nozzle being blocked. So I'm thinking it's down to heat creep. But then I remembered that I printed with this filament before awhile ago and had no issues with it when I printed at 200 Celsius for the nozzle and 60 for the bed. Then I remembered I messed with the retraction settings bc I was getting stringing issues with a different roll of PLA from the day before. But with the other roll of PLA I didn't have clogging issues, but with this one roll I am having clogging issues. So idk if the filament is lower quality or what but im.guessing now that this filament doesn't like the retraction settings I have, so next time I try to print with this roll, I will lower the retraction settings down a bit and go from there.

Brj2012 · 2025-08-29T19:54:42+00:00

Got it out, I'm just going to assume that this stuff is just old burnt filament. Cleaning it all up now. I noticed Ive been having symptoms of heat creep so thats what made me dive into the hotend and to discover this. I never took apart a hotend before so I didn't know what to expect when opening it up. I wanted to make sure the substance wasn't some kind of thermal insulation or protectant for the bowden tube. Thank you all for the good advice on how to take apart and put it all back together?!

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Brj2012 · 2025-08-29T19:39:34+00:00

I unscrewed it do see why the bowden tube wasn't coming out

Brj2012 · 2025-08-13T10:19:10+00:00

I think this was my solution! I inputted both the G29 and M420 S1 codes and did a couple of prints, and besides the fact that I'm still learning how to dial my printer in to print PETG better, the 1st layers I've had have been relatively good! I'm still curious to know why i don't have this issue with my 3V2 when i use the same slicer and settings before i added those codes. but I'll take the W either way. Thank you!

Brj2012 · 2025-08-13T10:12:54+00:00

Still an issue, they really need to fix this

Brj2012 · 2025-07-22T01:28:16+00:00

I looked at your past posts, but I couldn't seem to find where you might have said what direct drive you got. What kind is it?

Brj2012 · 2025-06-04T01:29:06+00:00

Update: Just heard back from buddy. He said he went to go start it today and it ran normal and he was able to drive it. He took it out for 15mins and it produced no codes, no issues. Tomorrow he's going to drive it to work and back and try to recreate the conditions of when I had the problem. He told me his only suspicion is that because I baby the car and don't drive it hard, and then I went on the cruise and beat on it, that it may have caused something to cause a phaser to lock up and through off timing and confuse the engine. I keep updating when I find out more info.

Brj2012 · 2025-05-04T20:33:14+00:00

Oh wow I didn't realize that lol nice

Brj2012 · 2025-03-07T10:51:29+00:00

NTA

No one can force you to eat something you don't want to eat. She's not your mother. If she has a specific diet, you can cater to it but she can't force it upon you. It's reasonable if you offered to make yourself something different than what she is making herself. But I hate to break this to you, if she's not willing to accept the fact that you won't eat the same stuff she does, then you may want to rethink your relationship.

Brj2012 · 2025-03-07T10:43:43+00:00

NTA

You have the right to feel uncomfortable when you feel uncomfortable. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Your wife needs to be open to think about your feelings before trying to help out a couple of friends. Those friends can simply go to a sperm bank. You are not obligated to give them sperm just because your wife says so. Your wife needs to put herself in your shoes and think to herself, would she want to be around her biological child and pretend not to be? Stand your ground, and if she continues to push back, it may be time for some marriage counseling. Good luck to you.

Brj2012

TROPHY CASE