Canon s9000 ink bleeding back into different colour tanks

[Amazonofexeter]

Hi everyone!

I have a Canon s9000 printer which has a few indiosyncrasities of its own (inc producing tri colour bands in prints if printing on canon or olmec paper but fine on ilford paper...) but which after two weeks of holiday I came back to use it, did a head deep clean (as after even a day the head does get dirty and the first inch at least of a print will be discoloured) and then a nozzle alignment (as this appears to have shifted in the past between print runs thus giving a regular band of less ink) - looking at the print out I noticed that the photo cyan and photo magenta were very off colour - i assumed it needed another head clean, which i did - replacing the cyan, yellow and magenta inks as they had run out. After doing the ink change and the second deep clean I printed a nozzle check which showed the two photo colours to still be off colour - so i checked them, and the two ink tanks appear to have been contaminated with a degree of black ink so the photo cyan has turned to a dark blue and the photo magenta has become a blackberry purple in colour!! This colour change appears to be al through the tank, although having done the head cleans etc this could be due to aggitation of the head moving.
I checked beneath the cartridges and could see no loose ink, so removed the head (complete with cartridges) and to the sides of the nozzles on the litle space of metal there was some loose black ink.

Does anyone have any ideas as to the cause of this, I do have spare ink cartridges for these colours but obviously don't want to install them if there is an obvious cause for the colour to have been discoloured!

Many thanks for any help you can offer - in the past I have washed out the 'reserve ink tank' and cleaned various foams etc, and it could be the printer is coming to the end of its life, but I'd like to keep it running for as long as possible if I could! (I have a spare s9000 donated to me after refilled cartridges leaked and flooded the machine, but haven't had chance to dismantle and clean it yet.)

Best wishes
John

 

[ghwellsjr]

First off, deep head cleanings use up the ink very fast, so unless you are refilling and don't mind the waste of ink, I would do regular cleanings instead. All that ink goes down into the waste ink absorber pads that line the inside bottom of your printer (you can't see them unless you take your printer apart). The printer keeps track of how much ink it deposits there and eventually will report that the waste ink "tank" is 95% full and will need to be serviced and the counter reset. At 100% it will quit working until the service is performed.

It is important to make sure your purge system is working before trying to diagnose other problems. It probably is working on your printer but you need to make sure. If you open your cover and wait for the print head to stop in the middle of your printer, look off to the right for two black coarse looking purge pads where the print head parks. Put some window cleaner like Windex or just plain water on them with a syringe or eye dropper or pinched straw, then do a head cleaning and see if all the liquid is sucked away. If not, report back for further instructions.

Now to your problem of cross contamination of your inks. This can happen inside the print head or outside the print head on the purge pads or it can happen from a leaky cartridge. Since you (or your donor) had leaky cartridges on the other printer, have you made sure this isn't a problem with this printer? Are you refilling for your printer? If so, how do you do it?

 

[leo8088]

Are you using refilled cartridges in this printer? If you are your BCI-6BK is probably leaking. Is it refilled with the top fill method? How did you seal the fill hole? It is probably not air tight. The black ink is leaking out of the nozzles. It is then sucked up by the PC and PM nozzles and the black ink finds its way into the PC and PM ink cartridges.

This may sound strange and hard to believe. But I have seen this repeatedly with my own eyes on various printers at different times. Fixing the seal of the cartridge always fixed the problem. The contaminated cartridges can be purged and reused again.

But if you are using OEM carts and they are not refilled, well, your print head is probably defective as said in the post above.

 

[Amazonofexeter]

Thank you both for your answers, I will go through your queries in order!

Re Deep cleanings - I've found i've had to do these before each print run in order to make sure the head is printing cleanly and not leaving odd dark bands in the 'print nozzle check' and colour shifts in the prints.

Waste Ink Tank - I have stripped the print twice and cleaned the waste ink tank each time over the course of owning the printer (and reset the code)

Type of ink cartridge - I always use OEM to ensure quality and print life is at optimum, friends who have used refills always seem to get colour shifts.

Purge system - does indeed appear to be working fine.

Cross contamination - i've never had an issue like this on the printer before (apart from the colour shift on the initial print of a print run) - it looks like some black ink was on the bottom of the print head, so has this just flooded onto the purge heads and then somehow been taken back up into the two photo ink cartridges? (while the system was off so no removal of ink except through gravity and a natural wicking effect - again, never been a problem before so why now - a leaky black tank? ).

The other printer - i've not run or tried this, and no parts have so far been used in mine, to my knowledge, he used OEM cartridges which he then refilled and which then leaked - I assume because of faulty seals when he refilled.

If this seems to be a random happening then I am happy to change the cartridges or to maybe try the other print head if I can clean it, but if there is an issue that is more serious then I don't want to waste ink!

Thanks for your help so far!

 

[ghwellsjr]

If you don't have a leaky cartridge, and you probably don't if you are buying OEM, then the "black" ink that you see on the bottom of the print head is probably a mixture of several different colors. It's possible that two weeks of idleness caused ink to saturate the purge pad and soak up through the print head and into the photo cartridges. Did you have the printer plugged in and turned on while you were gone? I always leave my printers on, just so they can take care of themselves. Do you turn your printer off at night? If so, why don't you leave it on all the time and see if that helps.

You should also put in fresh photo cartridges. If you see cross contamination in a matter of hours, it is probably a leak inside the print head, but I really don't know for sure.

 

[martin0reg]

I had this "cross contamination" on a S9000 too.
I also saw wrong ink color in the cartridges.
The wrong colors appeared in prints after a short time of idle, at the latest after one week, sometimes after one day.
Instead of cleaning cycles I print full A4/letter colorfield pages until it comes out in right colors.
This seems to clean the channels.

The purge system seems to work, you can see fluid disappear.
I never had this problem with the same non oem cartridges on ip4000
and I haven't found what is the cause of the cross contamination:
- wrong pression / depression of the cartridges and wicking effect
- leaking cartridge
- defective print head (but what kind of defect, if it works well after purging but lets the ink go in wrong channels?)

I did not use the s9000 for over 2 months and will see what happens next...
First of all I will have all cartridges on the same ink level to see if a cartridge which is almost empty would suck the ink out of one which is full.

 

[Amazonofexeter]

Ok - thank you - no, I didn't leave the printer on, and don't usually, but thats definately worth a try if it survives this latest episode (starting to wonder if I could afford a new one...lol)

And Martin - yup, sounds the same problem as me, good luck working it out - if i find anything then i'll post it here!

 

[nche11]

The culprit is in the cartridges. It is a simple leaking cartridge symptom that has been discussed in this forum many times before. Don't mess with your print head. Don't mess with your purge unit. But I know, it is extremely hard for most people to put in new OEM cartridges that will fix it instantly. Most people would rather try many things, even tricks that are considered extremely risky, before trying new OEM cartridges. But this is a matter of faulty ink cartridges. Borrow a set of OEM cartridges if you have to.

 

[ghwellsjr]

From post #4:

Type of ink cartridge - I always use OEM to ensure quality and print life is at optimum, friends who have used refills always seem to get colour shifts.

 

[Amazonofexeter]

Thank you! Always good to see people reading all the info before making statements! Back home now, going to check the printer tomorrow and probably try new cartridges - hoping for the best!