This isn’t good. Any pointers on how to remove it?
You can heat the hotend back up to temp and it should liquify the plastic around the hot end. Slowly pull down on the plastic mess and it should come off. Happened to me once.
You need to go buy a heat gun immediately! Had this happen, thought reheating the print head would be enough, nearly tore my print head apart, used a heat gun and heated up my print head and was able to pull the assemblely off piece by piece safely. Heart guns are awesome!!! I wish I would have gotten one sooner: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10706
You can get them as cheap as $20, the one above is super awesome though
Heat gun all the way on that. Becareful of the wires and other non heat resistant things in its path
The problem with everyone recommending a heat gun is that all the components around there are also plastic. I’d heat the hot end up to temp, disconnect that fan shroud, and try and pull it off as a single piece.
Definitely re-heat the hot end and try to gently get the chunk off as a single piece. When I had to do this, I lost the thermistor along with the plastic, but if you’re more careful than I was it should survive.
@Stephen_Baird got one also, was able to pull it out by heating the hot end (for a while) + using a solder station SMT hot air gun with a small nozzle (2mm low speed) to dig my way and save the cables. Looked like ugly meat job.
Had it few times, heat the hotend to +10 or 15C then usual and wiggle or pull down the blob slowly, try to find spots that blob may stick to other parts and lose them too - maybe with knife.
Also you can remove the hotend and do that outside of printer bed on some surface, while heating up use flat screw driver to slowly pull out plastic starting from top.
Switch off or disable the hot-end cooling fan, then heat it all up for 15 minutes to the material temperature, clean with tweezers and then use a toothbrush to clean up as much as you can. Finally a microfibre cloth to pull off the last bits of hot sticky plastic. Yes, I have done this many times…
@ThantiK “The problem with the heat gun…” there is no problem with the heat gun, focusing the heat on the parts that aren’t plastic is really easy to do with the model included in the link. When this situation happened to me, the plastic was too large for the hot end to heat enough. Heat gun was absolutely the only option. If heating the print head was enough, lucky you, but don’t damage your print head when a $20 heat gun can save you.
You’re a lot more thorough than I’ve ever been @Richard_Horne , there are probably still little blackened bits on my hot end from the time I had to clean one of these off. Especially in the little crannies.
Carefully?
…I would try to heat up hotend and carefully try to break off from the surrounding cold parts
If your 3d printer parts are abs and the failed print is pla you could put in boiling water. If you can get it disassembled to just the impacted parts
I used @Richard_Horne method, worked pretty well. I had to take off the cooling fan and duct (the duct was made of PLA and was destroyed).
I’m pretty sure one of the parts came loose and stuck to the nozzle, causing this failure.
Thanks everyone.
You’re screwed, throw it all away and build a Taz-6… Oh, you got it? Ok, ignore me… ;) I’m always looking for excuses to upgrade.
I’m already designing my own printer similar to a lulzbot TAZ. 
If that is ABS, acetone on a cotton swab should help remove any residual plastic.
Looks like somebody just set it and FORGET IT!
One thing I never recommend! I always tends and watch my prints in case of fails! Good Luck!