Anatomy of a Canon Waste Ink Tank (or Waste Ink Pads)

[ghwellsjr]

Wow, I'm extremely impressed with the take apart and such superb and clear pics! Very well done my friend!!!

A quick question... I couldn't tell for sure, but was the pad pictured in this picture (the one that is completely saturated) the same thickness as the pads that sat on top of it?


Again, fantastic work and thanks for sharing!

No, of the three pads that span the width of the printer, the middle one is about twice as thick as the other two. The picture you referenced is of the bottom of the three. It appears that the ink flows across the pads from right to left and after a pad gets pretty much saturated, it starts flowing to the pad above. The saturated pads would pool ink if I poked them so they were really full of ink.

You can see the different thicknesses of the three wide pads in this picture.

 

[jimbo123]

understood that the printer doesn't know about the windex.

was wondering if the leakage and severely blackened pads were accentuated by the add'l windex

J

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Printers: Canon Pixma MP830, IP4500(spare), MP830(2 spares)
Method: German Durchstich Method using Canon Cartridges
Ink: Hobbicolors, great guy to deal with
Misc: Squeeze bottles, needles, scabbards from Howard Electronics

 

[ghwellsjr]

I don't know. Before I took my printer apart, I thought that any additional liquid would dilute the ink and help it spread through the pads and would eventually evaporate.

There had been reports that Inktec black pigment ink was prone to clogging and although I never had a problem with it clogging nozzles, I wondered if it clogged the sponge material in those 17 cartridges and if it clogged the waste ink pads.

I suppose I could test my cleaned pads (in my spare base) by dumping Inktec and other pigment ink in the place where the purge pump dumps it and see if it gets soaked up, then repeat with a mixture of ink and Windex. Now that would be a fun experiment! Yuck!

 

[JoePineapples]

You could wonder why printer manufacturers are not making a maintenance tank for smaller cartridges like this to aborb the ink, so you can easily replace them. It does not matter if you must pay for it every time, but it will be certainly much easier for most of us to replace the absorption material this way.

In some of the earlier Canon printers that the ink carts weren't attached to the heads .. used foam inside the ink cart to drain the ink .. so then you changed the ink cart you replaced the waste tank .. nice idea I thought .. mind you the P/H was a total bitch to change..

Joe

 

[l_d_allan]

I would recommend that people check their waste ink tank counter and when it gets above 80%, put that tray under the printer to avoid a mess, and order some new waste ink pads from Canon.

I was wondering how to get the information: "waste ink tank counter". Is this part of the info from an extended nozzle check? If so, how is it labeled? I recall getting my iP4500 to provide EEPROM info as part of the extended nozzle check (I think), and it wasn't clear what some of the abbreviations meant.
Thanks!

 

[ghwellsjr]

Here is a link to an image of the MP780 extended nozzle check. The first line contain the text D=003.6 which means 3.6% (I had recently reset the counter).