martin0reg
Printer Master
Good method, you have to be careful not to push the water too hard from inlet port to the nozzles.Grandad35 said:My son has a Canon with pigment black for text (BCI-3bk). He let it sit unused for a year and wondered why the black wouldn't print (surprisingly, the BCI-6 C/M/Y dye based inks all printed perfectly with just a cleaning cycle or two).
We pulled the carts and print head, then folded a paper towel 3 times (to make it 8 times thicker). With the towel in a container in the sink, we poured a little straight ammonia onto the towel (just enough to saturate the towel), then repeatedly pressed the print head straight down onto the towel until we could see ink push up from the inlet screens as we pressed down, then keep going about that long again. We fitted a syringe with a short piece of plastic tubing that slid over the inlet filter and pushed distilled water through each port on the print head to flush out the ammonia. We then used an empty syringe to push air through each port to blow any residual liquid from the head.
Every nozzle but one was opened up in a single cleaning.
You can do the cleaning also on paper towels: put the printhead on the folded towels, fill up the chambers round the inlet ports to overflow the inlet ports with warm water / ammonia dilution. The paper towel should soak up the fluids, you have to refill and overflow the inlet ports whenever the dilution sinks beneath the inlet filter (the small silver screens). Do it at least several hours.
And regarding a single clogged nozzle:
I once had one irregular point in the pgk nozzle pattern. I did a quick-and-dirty cleaning: take out the pgk cartridge, put a drop of water/ammonia dilution on the pgk inlet port/filter, put the cart back in and do a pbk cleaning.
The irregular point in the nozzle test pattern had moved to another place. After repeating the cleaning, it had disappeared.
This is a method for the impatient. The single clogged nozzle came back and I had to do the extern cleaning