The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #139265 Message #3192447
Posted By: JohnInKansas
22-Jul-11 - 02:37 AM
Thread Name: Tech: printer on the fritz
Subject: RE: Tech: printer on the fritz
I'm guessing that you use ink cartridges that have the print heads built into the cartridge. When the cartridges are filled, the little holes that the ink actually squirts out through don't have any ink in them (for most such cartridges). There may be some older ones that have a protective piece of tape, or a plastic cap, over the print head/squirt holes, but with the newer ones the protective tape that you remove is only to protect the electrical contacts that allow the printer to say when to squirt and how big the drops should be.
Once you've installed them, the system is "primed" by feeding ink right down to where it's ready to come out, so after that the ink can dry in the tiny holes where it's very difficult to clean dried ink out.
Sometimes printers come with a small plastic cap for you to snap on over the print head side of a cartridge that you need to remove for a while. A few new cartridges may come with a cap of the sort on the new cartridge, and you could use one of those to "cap" a cartridge that you need to remove for more than a few moments.
If you don't have a "cap" designed for the cartridge you use, the normal recommendations is that you put the ink cartridge in a small plastic bag (a sandwich bag, perhaps). Squeeze as much air out as you can, and fold the bag over to create a seal. Tape it shut if you feel you need to.
Note that a straight crease running all the way across the bag is a better seal than any method of tying knots in it, twisting it, or whatever other thing the voices in your head tell you to do.
"ZIP LOCK" bags are about the last thing you should rely on for keeping air out. If that's the only thing available I'd cut the zipper off and make a clean fold, taped down, but zip-loks have to be made of thicker material for attaching the "zipper," so they don't even fold as cleanly as a cheaper bag. The only problem is that it may be extremely difficult to find bags without the #@$!^*@ ZipLok tops on them (becaue consumers really are mostly idiots).
An alternative would be to wrap the whole cartridge fairly snugly with something like a SaranWrap "transparent film food wrap," if you can keep the wrinkles out so that the seal is fairly tight.
A cartridge that's been out "too long" will sometimes clean up with a few repeats of the printers "cleaning cycle," but with the tiny ink amounts in cartridges for most machines, a dozen cycles will empty the ink from the cartridges (or the colors, for multi-color cartridges) that work, without really cleaning the one that doesn't.
For printers that have an "ink saver head parking" function (see blather in previous post), the clean-cycle-to-prime, turn-off-to-park-and-soak cycle may open up a dried out head while there's still some ink left; but it's a fairly low-odds thing to depend on.
John