Another rescue attempt on a WP 4015

[pisquee]

All I can remember is that he said they could use alcohol based cleaners, but the dilution could not be above a certain proportion, which I can't remember what it was. We always just use proper printer flush/cleaning solution on our wide formats - we get it from the manufacturer of our inks, it works, so we don't need to try anything else.

[GoonerGary]

We always just use proper printer flush/cleaning solution on our wide formats - we get it from the manufacturer of our inks, it works, so we don't need to try anything else.

What does it smell of?

I would be interested to see a pic of some of your solution dripped onto dried printed transfer paper. I done a series of tests on solutions to see how they handled clogged dried ink.

[Greybeard]

Managed to open up the machine, and get good access to the print head this morning. A lot of dried ink in the well below the path of the head, not sure how it got there, but managed to remove most of it with my flushing mix. Cleaned everything else along the path the head follows, including the wiper blade and the waste ink/cleaning pads.
The underside of the head left a lot of ink on the pad of T-shirt material that I'm using, so after reassembling the covers,etc., I did a few nozzle cleaning sequences.No great improvement in the cyan, so I'll leave a pad soaked in cleaning fluid underneath the head overnight.

Question - at some stage, the flushing solution will start to arrive at the nozzles, when I will see what appears to be another blockage.
Perhaps I should introduce some ink into the carts, but what colour ?Change them all around, so that when one colour changes to a faint trace of a new one, I know that it is flushed ?

John

[GoonerGary]

Don't contaminate your lines. Add a small amount of cyan ink into the cyan cleaning solution cart so that you will see a faint cyan nozzle check when printed.

[Greybeard]

I've now got the printer installed on my laptop running ubuntu 12.04.
This now allows me to run my own test print/purge files.
Black/Magenta fine, and a couple of nozzle cleans brought the yellow on now.
The cyan is being stubborn though, but observe that immediately after a nozzle clean, it prints better, but slowly fades.
I'm printing a page full of vertical stripes, and at the top of the page I'm getting about 30% of the nozzles firing, but as the printing proceeds, they fall away to about 2%.
My immediate thought is that this may be a sign of air in the system. The overall loss at the start may well be clogged nozzles, but the fact that they consitently fade away may be an added effect from air bubbles present in the head.

As I've run quite a few test prints stripes with four colours, and there is no sign of this effect in the other three colours, suggesting that my flushing solution has not yet bled through.
I wonder how many pages that will take ? Could be wasteful of paper ! Perhaps over printing while I'm pushing the cyan cartridge, might help.


By the way, re colouring my flushing fluid. The machine seems to have done it for me. Some ink has appeared in each of the cartridges around the outlet valve suggesting to me that there is a back pressure from the ink delivery system during a head clean, or such like.

Any thoughts on the above will be welcome, as always.

John
EDIT Lots of printing and the test print is now showing all colours fading.
Problem if they all vanish. How do I know that I haven't got some of the nozzles still clogged ?

[mags1892]

i make my own cleaning fluid which has distilled water, isopropyl alcohol (not rubbing alcohol in EU as this contains lanolin)
and ammonia 33% (in small quantities). this works brilliantly.

[Greybeard]

Hi mags1892, and welcome.
You ought to be a little more precise when recommending a recipe.
To my mind, 33% Ammonia is rather more than 'in small quantities', or do you mean that the ammonia that you have is 'household ammonia' (as bought from your High Street chemist)which is diluted with 66% water, then you only use a small(?) quantity of that ?
Do you see what I mean ?

Regards
John

[GoonerGary]

When printing your purge sheet, make sure that you have your printer driver set to Best Photo so that plenty of ink is being delivered. If it is on a draft or plain paper setting not enough ink will reach your nozzles to print.

[Greybeard]

Thanks Gary.
Now why didn't I think of that !!

John

[GoonerGary]

Print about 20? purge sheets (guess) on Best Photo and that might shock your printer into life.