Nozzle has become dry and brittle

[AnotherGuyver]

Hello everybody,

I went to replace my nozzle the other day, which is not a rare occurrence, because I like to switch between the 0.4 and 0.6 for different prints, and heard kind of a crackling sound coming from the nozzle, when I touched the rubber. I found this weird and remove it only to find the nozzle looking like that:

I have been printing only for a year, so I have no idea what might have caused this. I wrote to BL support and they told me it’s normal, since a nozzle is a consumable component, but it does strike me as odd that it would end up in this condition. None of my other nozzles look anything close to this. This is the nozzle that came with the printer, so it is the oldest one, but still…
Did you guys experience something similar? Is this really just regular wear and tear? Or did I do something wrong?

Cheers,
AnotherGuyver

[mltriebe]

Is that the thermal paste that dried up maybe?

[AnotherGuyver]

Yeah, so basically everything was pretty dry. But I’ve never heard of thermal paste drying up…

[PhillipM]

The type of thermal paste used for these heaters always goes dry and brittle.

[JonRaymond]

It is an issue often overlooked.

Thermal Grease: Small Cause -> Big Effect on printing results

Since most Bambu Lab printers are the same age, I can imagine that this problem could affect several people here in the forum. My printer has been producing imperfect prints from time to time lately. After 3 weeks of vacation I wanted to use it yesterday and this is what I got as a result: [IMG_0421 2] So I cleaned the nozzle according to the instructions and was in good spirits when the next print looked pretty decent at first glance. When the printer stopped extracting filament after a …

[AnotherGuyver]

Wow ok, now this is interesting. So what kind of thermal grease is recommended? I have quite a lot of thermal paste for CPU cooler lying around. Is that the same thing?

Cheers