One of the things that many people don’t realise is that whenever the print heads go through a cleaning process, they do it by squirting ink through the heads. The ink falls out of the bottom and into ‘wells’ usually packed with foam. These wells become full over the years until ink literally spills out of them and usually gets dragged around by the heads and you find streaks on the paper and all sorts of mess.
To empty the wells is simple. You’ll need a plastic syringe. Depending on printer model, I have found one of the best methods is to open the lid, switch the printer on, and as it goes through it’s initial setup process at each power-on event, the heads will move along the rail a short ways - it’s while they are away from the ‘parked’ position that you have your finger on the power switch at the wall - or have someone standing by ready - and just switch off at the wall. This will depower the machine with the heads out of position. I have done this on various printers over the years to no ill effect. After all, there has to be circuitry inside that can cope with a natural power failure without causing damage. You then insert the end of your syringe into each well and suck up all that horrible black mess and empty into a container of your choice. You’ll be amazed at how much ink was sitting there lurking beneath your print heads! Give the area a good mop up with paper towel. To finish, simply power back on and the heads will go through the setup process again and park where they normally do. Some printers you can manually move the heads along the rail while the power is off, but by no means all. Hope this helps someone! Dave - you need to RTFM to find out the flashing light combo and what it means ;-) Cotty On 8 Mar 2023, at 21:47, David J Brooks <pentko...@gmail.com> wrote: I did notice a blob of coloured ink on a piece of foam on the left hand edge of the printer head rail, could that be it -- %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List To unsubscribe send an email to pdml-le...@pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
