CISS Not flowing to cartridge (air in tube?)

[ivanalbright]

I have an epson workfoce 610 with a CISS that looks exactly like this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vmScQRfIso

I've been using it about 6 months now and it has been mostly okay. It has always given me random "cartridge not recognized" errors (once every 50-100 pages or so), which I was able to fix by just removing then re-seating the cartridges.

However, the last time this happened the ink does not appear to be flowing from the tanks to the cartridges and nothing I have done seems to fix it.
Problems/Observations
--When trying to print, only the blue is working properly (other colors come out just a little or not at all)
--I can see there is now air in the tubes toward the cartridge end.
--The ink tanks are at the same level as the printer as instructed and I didn't move them.
--When re-seating the cartridges I did have to lift them up a few inches, but I've done that many times before with no problem.

Things I have tried during troubleshooting without success:
--When I lift the ink tanks up above the printer, the ink flows into the cartridges and the air in the tube disappears. I've then tried printing with the tank still above the printer but nothing changed. When moving the tanks back to printer level, the ink flows back out of the cartridge and the air bubble reappears
--I've tried pulling the whole thing out, setting it on a tray, removing the plug on the cartridge and on the ink tank. This let ink slowly into the cartridge and after 15-30 seconds ink started coming out of the cartridge's plug hole which I quickly re-plugged. However when I put everything back into the printer the air in the tubes had reappeared and the problem was not fixed.


In reading about this, I heard some mention of clamping the tubes then doing something else to re-establish a vaccuum. It sounds like that may be the problem here? The explanation wasn't good and I'm not sure exactly where to clamp or what to do after clamping.

What should I try next to get this working again? Thanks for any help!

 

[qwertydude]

It might be time to reprime, sometimes air works its way into the primary chamber and reduces pressure to the print head enough to cause flow issues. The way I do this is to remove the whole set. Then one at a time I prime each one. The easiest way I've found to do this is to remove the priming plug on one and then lift the cartridge set above the tanks, this drains the primary chamber, then tilt the cartridges back and lower the cartridges below the tank level. The primary chamber will fill up and at the same time drain excess air from the inlet chamber. Right before the ink will overflow simply replace the priming plug. This ensure the primary chamber is completely full and the inlet chamber has the minimum amount of air. This has usually gotten any flow problems solved in my CISS. The rest of the time was air in the print head, in that case that's another issue.

 

[ivanalbright]

Thanks for the response. I will try that the next time something like this happens - I didn't think about tilting the cartridges back to deal with the air in the different chambers. Unfortunately I cant see the ink level in my cartridges.

As for this problem, I did end up sort of fixing it: Before reading your response, I was trying a few other things -- I popped off the plug on the cartridge, then used a syringe (with no needle) to pull air out of, and ink into, the cartridge (same as what I tried before). What I was apparently missing when I tried this before was before removing the syringe, I clamped the tube. Then removed the syringe, keeping the tube clamped, and replaced the cartridge plug. This apparently gets the vacuum re-established.

This seemed to work, though I had to do a number of head cleaning cycles, then power down the printer for a few minutes, then a few more cleaning cycles and sample prints. Eventually it worked.

(Be careful not to clamp the tube too hard. I actually did and now there is a tiny leak in the yellow tube...so everything works fine but the yellow now won't print very strongly. There appears to be tiny air bubbles flowing along it from the leak. Luckily this CISS is only about $20 so I am replacing it.)

For the future, since I'm sure I'll have similar problems down the road, how would you go about checking if it is air in the printhead? (And what do you do to fix that?)

 

[ocular]

I have a Epson workforce with a rihac CISS. Every few months the black would stop printing and only waiting over night after multiple head cleans did it restart. The last time this happened I reprimed the black cartridge. Rihac make it easy as there is a silicone plug that you can pass a needle thru and suck. The dynamics of this supports you observation that the system needs to closed after the excess air is withdrawn. The sytem started printing again straight away. I use a 'bull-dog" clip to clamp my tubing when I am moving things around to close the system. I put name card size card board padding down the vertical front of the ink cartridges to keep them snug against the pins so they stay recognised.

This is my first venture away from canon printers. The epson printheads seem inaccessible and non replaceable?