Best non spoiler tip for dealing with them I can give is this. Damage resistance doesn’t mean much when you hit them physically hard.

Also East TN. Took myself and the wife about 40 minutes of waiting to get ours cast.

This is really a head scratcher. I’m no Klipper expert when it comes to really tinkering with the printer.cfg, however if I was in your situation the next place I would go with troubleshooting would be on the firmware side of things. Klipper already makes regular backups of your important configs so maybe try making a copy of them and do a clean install of Klipper with a default printer.cfg for your printer and see if that helps narrow down the issue some more. Saves you having to spend money on hardware if you don’t end up actually needing it.

I’d say a Neo based on how the fan shroud looks

I swapped to direct drive myself. Went with the Creality Sprite Pro since I already had mounted a CR touch to my print head.I thought it made the most sense for interoperability.

I would consider looking into Klipper. That would be a fantastic upgrade and there are plenty of videos on how to go about it. The documentation for the project is also easy to parse.

It was the first major upgrade I did to my Ender 3 that I got back in July. Way too spoiled by it at this point to go back to Marlin.

So i think the gears might have been jammed something? Now the motor is turning perfectly fine in the correct plug. Must have just shipped that way from the factory i suppose. Thanks so much for the help!

Ok so i swapped the extruder connection to the Z stepper one and it did spin! So the motor’s not bad or the connection. Swapped it back to the extruder socket and nothing. So maybe its something in the Klipper config for the extruder?

Did do that yes. Double checked my config against another Ender printer with the same 4.2.7 board as mine and with the same hot end before starting my calibration.

I run Klipper firmware on this printer not stock Marlin. I usually print PLA at 210 so the temperature cut off wasn’t the problem. I fully heated the nozzle before trying to extrude filament.