Empty Vivid Magenta line on P600

[sflinter]

Hi,

I was experiencing major problems with Vivid Magenta on my P600 with no ink being deposited, and despite multiple cleanings under the print head and quite a number of printer cleaning cycles. Over the weekend, I disassembled the print-head and flushed print head cleaning head fluid from the intake spigot through the line, completely cleaning the line. I also flushed and cleaned the print head mechanism and print head plate.

I am now (reasonably) confident that the line is clear and the print head is clean and unblocked. However, when I restart the printer, it does not appear to be drawing any VM ink back into the line, but I do see evidence of ink pooling at the intake spigot.

Can anyone provide any suggestions as to how I might reprime the line, or if there are any things that I should try?

Thanks,

Steve

 

[Greatwhitewing]

If you get any air in the line you have to run what I call a priming cycle. What your printer did when you first tirned it on. It will use a lot of ink from all channels. To run that you need an aftermarket program called "Epson Adjustment Program" you buy for a small fee.
https://adjprogram.com/epson-p600-adjustment-program.html

There may be others. I am no expert but been through the VM issue too

 

[sflinter]

Many thanks for the prompt response I'll check that out.

Do you know whether it makes any sense to try to manually prime the line, by, for example, pumping 3rd party ink directly into the line to try to fill it?

 

[Greatwhitewing]

According to my limited understanding it's not possible but if you find a way let me know.
Be careful taking my advice since my P600 is currently dead, long story of problems enough to make me regret the purchase. Last chance is clean set of carts to run windex through

 

[sflinter]

A further update on my situtation:

I recently purchased Marrutt after-market ink. I manually primed the VM line, by injecting 5-10 mls of the relevant ink into the line. However, after a few cleaning cycles, I can now see that there is air in that line - not just a couple of small bubbles, but a lot. This suggests to me that the problem is with the ink intake spigot, as opposed to the print-head.

I have run a lot of cleaning fluid through that line, starting at the intake spigot, over the past few months, so I would be surprised that this issue might be caused by dried ink.

Any other thoughts on how air might be getting into the line, and ideas on how to address it?

Thanks,

 

[Greatwhitewing]

There is "adjustment program" that you can run an initial inkcharge routine, among other things, but it will prime all the channels. www.2manuals.com
I have heard of programs called "rip" I think that can control each channel but are quite expensive and for pro high volume printers. I have no experience with them, only heard they exist.

 

[sflinter]

Thanks for the tip, Greatwhitewing, however, I think that there is an issue with the ink intake itself. I had primed the line with ink, but after a few cleaning cycles, there are now many air bubbles in the line. It appears to me that air is entering the line at or near the ink intake.

 

[sflinter]

I believe that I finally managed to solve the problem, in part, due to the help of the good people at Marrutt.

For the benefit of anyone else who is facing similar problems, here are the steps that I went through:

• I removed (unscrewed ) the cover from the printer and unscrewed the damper unit from the printhead.
• Once that was done, I flushed print head cleaning solution through the Vivid Magenta line. I did this by injecting the fluid into the ink intake port and gently pushing the fluid through. I flushed enough to be sure that all ink and ink residue had been flushed out. I was careful to catch any ink/cleaning fluid in a container, to prevent it going into the rest of the printer
• Then, I reattached the damper unit to the print head, with the line full of fluid and reinserted the ink cart into its slot
• I left the printer sit for a few hours to let the fluid do its job dissolving any remaining blockages
• Next, I started the printer, and started to print a VM flush image on A4 printer paper (regular paper is fine, you don't need high quality photo paper)
• The basic idea of the last step is to "print" out the cleaning fluid, and have the ink be drawn into the line behind it
• This is indeed what happened, but it took many (>50) printing pages to draw the ink fully down the line. As all that was happening was the cleaning fluid was being printed out, the paper itself could be reused.
• After 10-20 pages of this, I could see the ink entering the line, and could track its progress down the line, as more pages were printed.
• As the VM ink finally got near to the print head, I ran a couple of cleaning cycles to draw it down the last part of the line and to prepare the print head for printing.

So far, this has worked well, and I've been happy with the quality of the prints that I'm getting. I'll continue to monitor it, but hopefully this explanation has been helpful to someone in a similar situation.

FYI, if you're unfamiliar with how to remove the cover and to remove the damper unit, there are a few videos on YouTube that explain the progress well enough.