I have not touched 3d printing since it's inception until just recently. I got an ender 3 v1 (from what i can discern) for free from some mother who claims her kid got it free from her school when they upgraded to something else. she had no idea of the condition of it so i decided to delve in finally to see if i can get it to work.

brought it a new magnetic bed, leveled it to the best of my ability with the paper method everyone seemed to use. pushed all the old filament that was still in the tube from when they gave it to me and loaded it with some elegoo matte red pla. tried to print benchy to see what was up, first few layers went down fine and then basically:

>extruder gear skipping
>print fucks itself and starts turning into nonsense mush
>looks like it's barely extruding 15 minutes in

i've narrowed down the problem to just the nozzle and the extruder gear. I'm hoping it's just the nozzle that needs actual replacement due to it being old as fuck to begin with, but is there a chance the extruder is also worn to fuck as well? should i replace the extruder too with an all metal setup since it's pretty cheap?

realizing now that it's probably foolish to even chuck more than 50 bucks into this thing to get it working simply because printing has come a long way since this thing was first introduced and i can get a refurb/used newest iteration of this printer for something to the tune of 100 dollars and have significantly less shit to fuck around with. Is it even worth it to go further than a new nozzle with this thing?