Epson Stylus Pro 7600 colors dropping at random

[Droidy Pendejo]

Hi there



I have an Epson Stylus Pro 7600 color printer. I do nozzle checks daily and today Cyan gave me an odd print (1st picture). It's just incomplete? So, after the 2nd nozzle check (2nd picture), cyan looked like there was an air bubble in the ink line. I performed a cleaning and did a 3rd nozzle check(3rd picture) and now the light black is losing portions of the lower print. The first print is the most puzzling to me. Any thoughts?

Thanks

Picture 1:

Picture 2:

Picture 3:

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Sudden air in the tube or printhead is very inprobable unless you do refill and injected some air into a cartridge.
The Pro 7600 is a pretty old printer, reliable over years but may require some inspection when it is getting old. One focus should the the cleaning unit , the correct movement of the rubber lip to wipe off the nozzle plate , congestion in the tube leading to the waste ink container, but this would require you to remove the side panel on the right side. It could be as well that the dampers, some small filter and reservoir per ink channel on the printhead may need replacement. The fine mesh wire filters in the dampers tend to clog over time and partially block the ink flow. Such dampers are available as spareparts, as well via Aliexpress but their exchange on the printhead is a little bit tricky. You may look for a maintenance manual describing that process in detail. So yes, it could this or that at this time. You should know that the cleaning process on the 7600 works such that the printhead carriage couples into a gear wheel on the right side and is actually pumping the ink through of the nozzles with pressure and not sucking with underpressure as done on the smaller desktop units.

 

[jddriver]

Hi guys, I am researching how to get my newly bought, second hand pro 7600 to work. When I bought it, it printed a near perfect nozzle check and a very good test image. All looked good, so pay the money and off I go, but since then I have had very little success, after spending half a day cleaning all of the old ink away from the section where the head rests, it was in dried up chunks, eventually took off all the cowlings to get to it. Also cleaned out where the maintenance tank sits, this was fairly new and even after multiple head cleans and soaks there was very little to see on the pads. Anyhow the head does not lock into place, which I thought was strange, all the articles I have seen tell you to push down on the paper cutter to release the head, no worries, but with the cowling off you can look down from above and with the head parked you can see that it is not sealing onto the capping station, ok so a little push makes it do that! So even if I have to do this after each print I am not worried. But I noticed that there is a huge bubble in the LT Blk ink tube which does not move at all during a clean, there is NO sign of Lt Blk in the nozzle check at all. but now most of the other colors are only giving very intermittent nozzle checks. I appreciate your advice re the way the printer cleans the head, in that you say it uses pressure, I wondered how it worked because for the life of me I was sure there was no vacuum happening during cleaning. Now that I have disconnected all the tubes and flushed them through checking to see that fluid is coming through to the maintenance tank area, so no blockages there, I notice that there is a lot of ink getting put onto what appears to be a curtain in the front of the flushing box assembly, this then drains down into the maintenance tank. I clean this and after doing a head clean there is definitely plenty of ink on there. I have done all the usual paper towel under the head overnight, several times and it gets soaked in ink. I have also filled the capping station with cleaning fluid and parked the head onto it, for a short time then, I seem to get a better nozzle check, but alas the air bubbles in the ink lines which are of course at the highest place where they loop around in a circle on top of the head do not move. It is impossible to see if any of the ink is moving during a cleaning cycle. So am I looking at removing dampers and head to clean it or should I just give up and not spend any more money? Thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[jddriver]

On the cleaning issue, there is a clear tube that comes from what I can only think is the pump, this goes to the flushing box and goes down the guts of the big tube that is attached to the flushing box, attached to this pump is also a black tube that comes from the capping station, I have watched this when the printer is doing a clean, have only ever seen cleaning fluid flow down there which would have been put onto the capping station, should I not be able to see ink?

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

There are several possibilities for the effect you are reporting - it could be that the rubber lip wiping off the nozzle plate is not in place. The rubber lip is moved down for the wiping action and then shifted up again, this lip may disengage and not do its work anymore. The cleaning does not happen via suction with the pump but via pressure inside the printhead. There is a gear wheel on the right side of the carriage which engages with other wheels in the most right position and let the nozzles spit into the flushing box. The other actions are cleaning and wiping. There may be other effects causing the dripping , and a look into a maintenance manual may help in this case.
If the nozzle check does not get o.k. the ink flow could be impeded, not by air typically unless you do refill and pump air instead of ink into the cartridge. The dampers on the printhead are a critical item, they contain a small ink reservoir and a fine wire mesh filter which tends to clog up after longer operating times. Replacing the dampers is a recommended service action in that case. Those dampers are available as spare parts , as well via Aliexpress. Be cautious if you plan to do that, there are small 3mm O-rings where the tubes are held with a nut on the dampers, and these O-rings tend to drop away into nowhere. You may order them as well as spares at the same time. But beyond that my 7600 is just printing, and I have (to) reset some maintenance counters over the years, cutter, tubing, motors etc.

 

[jddriver]

Hi Ink Stained Fingers, LOL great nick.

I have located and cleaned all the gunk off the wiper blade and watched it move up and down, pretty hard to see how well it is wiping the print head, it is a bit bowed but nothing broken off it, so still in one piece, I see where you can buy new ones from Ali Barber which look to be urethane or some such other modern material.

I have taken your advice and have now got the dampers out and the two black are all but leaking past the clear soft plastic membrane certainly if you touch the Lt Blk you get ink on your fingers. No sign of any puddling at all but I think it wont be long before it is a major issue. So have found some to buy and will go ahead and get them, they seem simple enough to change over BUT I have not discharged the ink out like the manual says to do. I thought that I would see how far I can get with dismantling first, so if I undo the ink pipe from the damper is ink going to come out under pressure or will I just lose a few ml from the end of the pipe?
Also as I have this thing pulled this far apart I thought that maybe with the right size plastic hose I could attach to the nozzles on the print head I could flush some cleaning fluid through and collect it onto some paper towel underneath, a bit like you do on desktop printers with carts on top of the print head. Other than that at this point getting the damper assy back in and that screw back in seems to be the biggest challenge to me! Your thoughts would be appreciated. Cheers.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I had a similar effect longer time ago, a bad nozzle check print after a cleaning cycle which may have been caused by some ink flow problem, the nozzle check was o.k. a day later again.
Since you went so far already go ahead and replace the dampers. The cartridges are not under pressure, once you get the tubes off the ink would run back, you may take small clamps to close the tubing so don't have to pull ink after reinsertion, you basically won't need to do an ink charge again, and you may fill the new dampers about half, not completely, some air volume is needed to buffer small pressure changes - (it's called damper) . Yes, and you can flush the nozzles at this time as well. It's all pretty tricky and not easy to handle, you get a feeling that Epson/Seiko watchmakers were involved in the design....
I flushed two of the dampers against the ink flow direction with a cleaner and reinserted them, that told me that the dampers were clogged (in my case - since it was working again), I printed with them for a short while until I got the replacement dampers mailed . and yes, there is only one tricky way to get it all back into place - screws and nuts tightened etc.

 

[jddriver]

Great thanks for your help, I have ordered dampers, and have flushed the print head with windex and then with distilled water. All flushed very easy with no resistance. All the inks in the line and dampers look pretty liquid and I cannot see any lumps. I may do some damper flushing as well just to see if that helps then change them when the new ones arrive same as you did, it will probably take about 3 weeks for them to get here. Thank again for your help much appreciated and it may well get an old but good machine working again!

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

o.k., that sounds fine, come back and let us know when you get through it with the replacement action. You may not see much in the ink itself, there could be a fine smear on the filter membrane .

 

[Droidy Pendejo]

Ugh. Now it seems that I can't seem to get an Epson driver to work on my 64 bit Windows 7 laptop with my Epson Stylus Pro 7600. I downloaded the 64 bit version driver for Windows XP from the Epson website, in the hopes that it would work with Windows 7, but no luck. It installs the driver, but I can't get it to actually print. I'd prefer not to purchase an old XP system to network the printer together. Does anybody know of a workaround for this problem?