Aha a little story for perspective, OP. I have had an HH357 long barrel version for four or so months. Has always worked fine. The other day, the cat knocked my PV onto the floor and broke my drip tip. Thinking nothing of it, I
threw on another drip tip and continued to use my atty. A few days later, my PV kept telling me the load was too low to fire, but then it would fire intermittently. Finally getting sick of fighting it, I decided all it needed was a nice cleaning since I hadn't done it in awhile. I boiled some water and let it sit for awhile. Upon extracting it from the water and blowing it out, I noticed that there was a mass of something inside the atty. I thought it was boiled and then dried residue, and tried in vain to get it out. Finally I took a small screwdriver and popped out the mass - it was the bottom half of my broken drip tip. So for three days with a drip tip stuck inside it, my 357 chugged along and I had no idea it was stuck in there and then all the work I did to get it out, dripped ten or so drips, and it's been working fine.
Lesson? These things are great.
