DSF

just refilled my new empty carts with my normal pigment ink that i use with my darkjet paper, i have treated myself to new empty carts in order to colour code my carts and ink so there are no more close errors in refilling them.

after the normal issues of no ink showing, and doing a couple of head cleans, i have only magenta coming through ??

any ideas ??

so far i have; cleaned the print heads, sworn, taken them out and reloaded them, they show up as full and fine on the computer, printed just a text document - just got blank sheet, done another head clean, got magenta only, sworn again, and have now switched off for a bit before it goes through the window

i have 2 printers one for sublimination SX515 and this one for pigment/darkjet printing

well i took out all the cartridges and put some vodka in it with a syringe so i did not get it everywhere, took the dogs to the vets, came back about an hour later, and took the very murky vodka out again, popped the inks back in again, ran off a few sheets of normal printing, and now have a very nice working printer again, a bit less vodka than i had to start with (but im not fond of drinking early on a monday anyway)

A lot of the time, just waiting will clear the problem.

What you tend to get is not a blockage but an air bubble that prevents the ink from getting to the printhead. If you just keep trying to print and headclean, the printhead overheats and you risk serious damage.

If you just wait (either an hour or two, or overnight), then there's a good chance that the air bubble will be displaced by ink settling and so you may find the problem just solves itself.

This air-bubble issue doesn't seem to affect printers that have their inks mounted remotely - because there's a line of ink between the cartridges and the printhead, so it's virtually impossible to get an air bubble at the printhead on those printers. It's high time that Epson produced desktop printers with remote mounted inks.

so would i have had an airbubble from filling up the empty carts ?? am i best to leave them in the future settle for a while before putting them in ??

oh well, only a thimble of vodka was used in the making of this print lol

If you took the carts out to refill them, then you're more likely to have an air bubble problem than if you refilled them in situ.

I used refill carts in a B40W and I very quickly got an air bubble in the cyan - I eventually left the printer in a corner and haven't been back to it in months. When I use refills in my Epson 1400s, I often have to wait a bit to get the ink flowing - they always have done, after a while.

These days I use Brother printers which have remote-mounted cartridges and haven't experienced the problem once (even when I remove the cartridges).

I'm no expert on the problem, but two and two makes four even when I'm do the adding. :biggrin:

i always take mine out when i refil them, and have never had this issue, unless, it was just that they were brand new ones as opposed to new old ones i was refilling if that makes sense

It's more likely to happen if you run the cartridges dry, because then there's no ink at the printhead. If you refill while the cartridges still have a good bit of ink in them, then there should still be ink at the printhead - which should decrease the chance of an air bubble getting in there.

The trouble I found with refillables is that they're so small that it's hard to know when they're nearly empty compared to when the status monitor counts that they should be empty. I still use refillables in my A3 Epsons, but they're only used for large items now. I use the Brother for A4 and smaller - mainly because the refillables for the Brother don't need refilling anywhere near as frequently.

hmmm, interesting JSR thanks