Epson Workforce 600 CIS hoses seem clogged

[bh0526]

A friend gave me a new Epson Workforce 600 printer last year. I didn't use it much. Now I wanted to make some copies of colored pages. The pages came out all faded. I did all the cartridge cleaning things and no luck. But as I look at the 4 hoses that go from the continuous ink containers to the printer, I can see that they are clogged, or at least 2 of them. It does not appear that the ink is flowing thru smoothly. I suspect that they got clogged because I did not use the printer too much.

How can I fix this problem?

Thanks,

Bob

 

[websnail]

Chances are that the tubes are fine but a combination of ink settling in the cartridges and nozzle clogs are to blame.

To resolve settled inks you need something like a full through adapter (also known as a "bottom fill adaptor") and a syringe to plug into the cartridges ink exit port (the hole at the bottom where ink normally feeds into the printer) and draw the ink through the cartridge into the syringe. This pulls through any existing ink in the cartridge out and freshens the supply from the reservoir... You can simply dump the ink back into the correct reservoir and re-use.

As for nozzle clogs... That's something a bit more manual and to be honest the best plan of action there is to get hold of Art Entlich's printhead cleaning manual (Details on how to contact him here).

Takes a bit of patience and depending on what ink you have, either some distilled water or an appropriate cleaning solution but it can be done easily enough.