Look at what was in my extruder… I wonder how it managed to spin like that… Now I understand why the filament wasn’t coming in our out…
Heat creep. The filament got soft and bent. Cooling the hotend should fix it.
@Brook_Drumm this was in between the two gears of the extruder. It is PLA and I was using 200°. All went fine until the middle of the print. Isn’t it strange that it get too hot?
How hot was your motor? I could see, in theory, if you’re doing a lot of retracts so the same small area of filament stays in the cold-end for a long period of time and the motor is hot enough long enough that it heats up the hobbed bolt and everything around it PLA could soften and deform.
Or, alternatively, if it’s a direct drive extruder and your retract distance is very high heat-creep-weakened filament may have ended up pulled back to the gear and deformed there.
Because that doesn’t look like a high force kink, it does look like a loss of structural integrity.
Filament kinked coming of the spool
I had the same thing happened on my bondtec extruder when I didn’t get the ptfe tubing pushed in all the way. There was a gap and the petg I was running wadded up like that. Could not feed the filament through until I got it out.