Story time. A1 Mini has about 16 months of light printing on it, and I've followed all my maintenance schedules, including replacing the hotends. I got a massive clog the other day that went up inside the head. Tried everything to clear it, but the hotend heating assembly was damaged. Ok, no worries. I ordered a replacement from Bambu, along with new hot ends. Took it apart, replaced the heating assembly and the hot end.

Next print, stuff isn't adhering, either to the texture plate or the cool tack plate. So I recalibrate everything. Back to printing. It's adhering, but the machine is making a terrible sound. Like a rattle inside the tool the head beyond what you'd hear with vibration testing or anything. I'm thinking I didn't tension a screw or something. Take it back apart, check all the screws, everything is tight and I can't locate anything that should be making that sound.

I put it all back together, run a print. It sounds rough, but the print comes out, as does the second. A couple of days later, I run a third print, all of the same thing (simple little baseball holders for my son's wall). I get an error message on my phone saying there's a tangle. When I go to the machine, the whole toolhead has clogged up again like the original issue. It's still hot, so I'm able to dislodge most of the plastic with some pliers and am able to pull the hot end.

Unfortunately, it looks like the plastic got up inside the assembly again, damaging the clips and stuff that hold in the hotend. This means I'm going to have to replace the whole heating assembly again.

Given the fact that this clog happened twice over the course of 4 prints, and given the weird rattle/grinding sound (that has to be a ball bearing issue or something), should I just assume this thing is cooked and move on?

Anyone else experience anything like this?

Are your extruder gears/bearings intact? What type of filament are you using?

It's a shot in the dark, but i know the Elegoo Centauri Carbon has an issue where the extruder gear bearings just completely disintegrate and it causes similar sounding issues. Have you torn into the extruder, or just the hotend?

Replacement parts aren't horribly expensive, even if you hypothetically had to replace the entire extruder assembly.

Video may be helpful to diagnose.

I haven't taken apart the extruder since I got a piece of broken filament wedged in the gears a couple of months ago. My prints are almost exclusively Bambu PLA ordered off their site. The only thing I don't do and should is use a dryer.

I'm probably in the minority, but i'm not a huge believer in drying my filament. Unless its sitting out in the open for a VERY long time, but i usually store my filament sealed in some way. Cheap off brand filament is what has always caused most of my clogs. If you're using Bambu filament, it's very unlikely that its just a filament issue causing clogs.

Considering you already swapped the hotend once and had the issue again, if i was a betting man my money would be on something wonky with the extruder.

I'm honestly thinking about scrapping it and buying and HD2 or something. Either that, or a Onewheel.

The new X2D looks pretty juicy. Especially for $899.

That's the one I meant. The size, dual heads, plus the AMS, for $899 looks awesome. I can probably sell my A1 AMS too to defray the cost.

Nothing to offer other than we just recently had our first experience with the same "blob" issue in my kid's A1 Mini so I'll be replacing my first hotend and hotend heating assembly when the parts show up.