My Prusa Mini+ is broken

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 20:38:38 +0000
3dprinting

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)