3dprinter Clog... Need Advice

Doesn't look too good when things like this happen.
If you are really careful you could grab some small pieces of aluminium sheet to use as a heat shield for the wires and then grab a heat gun or paint stripper gun. I happen to have a cheap Chinese plastic welding heat gun with a range of heat settings and it has many stainless steel concentrator nozzles for all kinds of plastic welding and it is similar to this one on ebay but mine was much cheaper I used one of the small nozzles with a bend in it to fix a similar problem on my Anycubic Chiron 3D printer. If you are interested, my printer is the same as this
The trick is to start from the side furthest away from the wires and blow the hot air away from the wires and work your way backwards to the wire side. Then as the PLA softened I grabbed chunks of it with a pair of curved locking surgical forceps like these and gently pulled the chunk off while heating with the heat gun
If you take it carefully and only pull away small bits this method works very well and when close to the wires, protect them with a heat shield (I used aluminium sheet held in place with a bulldog clip) or you could tape some sort on insulation over the wires so they don't melt together. Remember that the heat from the heat gun is very hot so pay careful attention where you are pointing it as it can damage other things unintentionally.
Once you get the main clump of PLA away from the extruder then it is fairly easy to heat the PLA inside the hotend by blowing the heat gun straight on to the brass extruder nozzle. Be careful not to heat it too much as you may damage the thermocouple embedded in the hotend. Once I got the PLA inside the hotend melted I pushed more PLA through until it started coming out the nozzle and while still hot I then pulled back the filament. This worked for me and didn't take that long although I was taking it slow to minimise any mistakes.
Good luck and I hope this helps

 

I have used the heat gun method twice and both times it worked without any problems. The first time I didn't clean the bed before starting the print job and the item dislodged and luckily I noticed the problem within an hour, so not too bad but the second time I had too fast an extrusion rate and too small a layer height for the travel speed in order to thicken up the layers for a bit more strength and layer adhesion......it thickened up the layers okay or so I thought and I stopped watching after an hour or two on a twenty eight hour print job. When I came back twelve hours later it had thickened up the layers so much that the extruder collided with and dislodged the item from the heated bed and a stepper motor eventually stalled and then everything shut down due to a blown fuse on the stepper motor controller card and when I got there, the job had already cooled down into a 300mm X 300mm X 120mm blob of half a 1kg reel of filament......just great
Live and learn lol

 

Hmmm....the sidewinder is basically a smaller version of my Anycubic Chiron. The Chiron print area is 400mm X 400mm X 45omm whereas the sidewinder is 300mm X 300mm X 400mm. Still the sidewinder is a darn good size for making bigger things than just small models. The biggest thing I have printed was a cyclone dust extraction unit top and also the bottom at 380mm diameter and 60mm high. It took over two days to print and with 20% infill it used 1kg of PLA filament for each part.
Out of interest how good was the bed levelling on the sidewinder? I think the sidewinder had autolevelling and did it actually work?
I changed the levelling setup on the Chiron as the automatic levelling was a PITA and now I do it manually with a dial indicator on a mag stand clamped to the gantry and this works well although it can be quite fiddly. The four coarse thread manual bed adjuster screws were not very repeatable either so I replaced them for fine thread cap screws and also changed the crappy wire springs to slightly stronger machine springs and now it is much better. The Chiron still has cheap machine syndrome and for a few bucks more could be so much better but it does a reasonable job albeit quite slow.

The thing that annoys me is Fusion 360 only letting you keep your print designs and projects on their servers. I had a problem logging into my account when they changed their hobbyist policy and had to create a new account and this lost 3 months CAD work and my entire pet project which is an ultrasonic vinyl record cleaning machine that can clean 10 records at the same time in 5 to 8 minutes depending on how dirty are the records. Autodesk couldn't or wouldn't recover my designs and said that there is no guarantee on any project data for hobbyist accounts grrrr!!!!

BTW How did you go with the heat gun? Did you get the plastic inside melted so you could push filament through the hotend. Hopefully you didn't melt the wires

 

Looks like you need an Octopi to keep an eye on those print jobs.

 

What I can say about my Anycubic Chiron was that I unpacked it and checked all the parts were there and then assembled the printer which took about twenty minutes. When powered up it worked first shot and I printed the benchy test piece and it came out pretty good although not quite perfect. The problem was the auto bed levelling is close but could be a bit better as it has a very large print area so I ended up doing a full manual bed level and voila, perfect print jobs. Having the heated bed completely flat in all places is also a bit of an issue long term as over time it slowly warps. I have had to bend it back flat twice now and then I check it for flatness after with my dial indicator on a mag stand.
So far I have printed about 25kg of PLA filament and have only had a couple of major failures.....both on large print jobs and both my fault.....first for changing layer height to too low and the other for choosing the wrong infill settings in the slicer lol Both times the printer crashed and continued overnight until the blob of plastic got so big it stalled the stepper motors and blew the fuse in the power supply

If I was going to mod it I would put on a bigger hotend so I could increase the print speed so big jobs print faster and maybe I would get a thicker aluminium bed plate so it resists warping better but it is easier to just be patient and have another beer. BTW The aluminium bed has an Anycubic Ultrafilm layer on top and it is very good for part adhesion and cleans easily with a scraper and isopropyl alcohol

Overall I am very happy with it and I have done many very large print jobs on it.......lucky it lives in my large workshop which is half way up my yard and well away from the house......when you crank up the print speed, the stepper motors are bloody noisy in fact screaming! I know you can now get quiet stepper motor drive modules that just plug in but my philosophy is that if it aint broke........