How to confirm printhead failure

[canonfodder]

I wrote before about lubricants and mentioned in particular my experience with tin and solder plated contacts. Lubricants are especially helpful in protecting contacts that are exposed to vibration from outside causes. In vehicular applications, there are even company standards developed by Ford and GM in cooperation with the Nye Lubricant company. The auto companies do use lubricants on practically all connectors, regardless of the metals in use.

Vibration in an inkjet printer? Mine vibrate some, especially at the print head. At every single line! It's not a lot, but it is always there.

In addition to tin and solder coated contacts, the lubricants do have a place in the case of gold plated contacts.
I repeat here one of the links that I entered before. http://www.nyelubricants.com/pdf/NEW_89 ing_WP.pdf
There is more information than you might want to go through in this marketing white paper, but I copy below a short entry from that paper concerning gold plated contacts. We tend to think that gold solves everything, but this explains why that is not true.

"For gold-plated connectors a lubricant reduces noble metal wear during mating and separation. It also protects against substrate corrosion.
Thin gold plating can be microscopically porous and a film of lubricant can seal the pores to prevent substrate oxidation, which can eventually exude through the pores, build up on the noble metal surface, and lead to high contact resistance."

I do not have a sample of the most recently developed and recommended lubricant, but I will seek one. We will see where that leads.

 

[Trigger 37]

Grandad35, Canonfodder,.... thanks a million for the information. I agree 100%. The lubricant must not be so conductive that it could cause a short between to adjacent contacts, or provide a low impedance path to print driver voltages. What does the article say about the conductivity of these lubricants. Also, as far as vibration, each cleaning cycle pulls down so hard on the printhead I'm sure this pulls on the contacts. People that turn there print on each day will see a cleaning each time and that must were on the contacts. The best solution IMHO is to leave it on all the time and try and print something in color every day, even if it is only the nozzle check. The less cleaning the less ink that is dumped into WIP (Waste Ink Pads).

By the way, when I put the same head in another printer, so far I have not been able to repeat the problem. Also, I put a brand new printhead into the i560 and of course it works fine. The good thing is I know there is no clog in the 1st printhead now. When I got it it had pretty bad clogs in black, Cyan, and magenta and those were cleared up with standard cleaning process.

One other question to Grandad35,....where can I find the details of the Dertchues??? refilling process. I have several magenta Canon ink carts that are slightly clogged and the modified cart cleaning process I use is not working as good as I expect. It has worked fine for me before but this last one does not seem to want to accept the new ink. Usually when it is refilled, the ink floods the sponge chamber all the way to the top. This last one does not want to flow and I though I would try a different refilling process to see if that can fix this ink cart.

 

[Tin Ho]

I finally believe I found the answer to the problem on the i560 printhead.
I had myself convinced yesterday that it "CLEARLY WAS A CLOG IN THE PRINTHEAD".

I did not follow this thread closely. So I may have missed most of it. But a quick browsing I saw these phrases of yours. They made me really curious that if you had used a good set of ink cartridges after you successfully unclogged the print head the first time? If you have not it might have been the reason the clog returned. If you used the same set of cartridges that caused the clog in the first place it would repeate it to clog it again and again. Iam sorry if this was already answered in the long thread.

 

[canonfodder]

The lubricant must not be so conductive that it could cause a short between to adjacent contacts, or provide a low impedance path to print driver voltages. What does the article say about the conductivity of these lubricants.

It might be thought that the lubricant needs to be conductive in order that the contacts would make good connections. That is not at all true. The lubricants are quite good insulators. Here is a quote from one of the articles that I previously linked to.

"If lubricants are insulators in bulk, how can they enhance the
performance of a connector, where contact resistance must be
minimal? The answer is found on the lunar-landscape-like
surface of a contact.



On a microscopic level, the contact surface is a series of
peaks and valleys. Current only flows where the peaks or
asperities touch (Figure 1). The actual contact area, therefore,
is rather small in some cases, less than 1% of the entire
contact. When the normal force on the contact is distributed
across the tips of the asperities, pressure increases to hundreds
of pounds per square inch, easily forcing the lubricant out of
the contact zone. In fact, tests show virtually no difference
in contact resistance between lubricated and unlubricated
connectors, however, there is an unmistakable difference in
connector performance and operating life."

I don't know if Canon has ever used contact lubricants in the printers we buy. I opened the sealed package of a new print head and examined the contact area. I saw no evidence of any lubricant there. A Canon service person installing a new print head might apply lubricant, but I don't presume so.

My Toyota automobile does have lubricant grease in all the connectors which I could conveniently unplug to look.

 

[Trigger 37]

Tin Ho, thanks for the question. I repair printers as a hobby. I get them back in top condition and then sell them. Yes I use know good ink carts to test each printer. I get the printers from all over ths U.S. and so many times they have junk ink carts, and to most people, these printer look and work link junk so they want to throw them away. I would estimate that I have been able to restore about 95% of them within one day. About 5% are really difficult. It seems there is no in between. It is a shame that people give up on these so easily. I guess it is the frustration factor,... and they have no experience with printers so they are so confused they just want to get rid of it. The answer is I have about 6 sets of ink carts in various other printers sitting around here that I know are good,... cause I use them every day. Right now I have about 15 Canon printers, 20 HP printers, and 10 Epson printers, and I just bought 25 more printers. Wow,... am I having fun. There is only one way to learn about printers,... take them apart,... find out what is broken, fix them,... and put them back together.

What I right about in my posts to this forum is the 5% that drive me crazy. This post covers two such printers and the last one was the i560. The good news is I learned a lot after all the testing I did and the cleaning process. The problem turned out to be an intermittant contact between the Carriage ASM and the printhead. As a result Canonfodder has provided suggestions about using Lubricants to extend the life of the contacts.

My mission with this post is to come up with Conclusion about how to diagnose printhead failures and to prove which ones are clogs that can be cleaned and which ones are real failures of the printhead or other parts of the printer. So I have to work with the printer that I have on had, since it is very difficult to get correct information from many of the people that have just found this web site. What I have learned so far is that you can't beat a Canon printer. If you want to hear some real horror stories, go to "Fixyourownprinter" and search for HP printer problems. Now that is a real horror story. I have not confirmed this 100% but so far from the best Tech's on that web site, there are no Service Manuals or Parts Catalogs, or Service Centers, or anywhere you can buy repacement parts for HP printers. Their mode is simply,... throw it away and buy a new printer. As far as Canon, I have not found one that I could not fix, and I have not found a part that I could not buy, even for a 5 year old printer. Try and say that for any other piece of electronics,... like a TV, or a DVD player, or a VCR,

I would love to hear from others that disagree with this OPINION.

 

[Trigger 37]

Canonfodder,.. I'm going to see if I can get some lubricant from Fry's electronics. They have just about everything. Thanks for the information.

 

[canonfodder]

Trigger 37, Frys.com sells a Caig Labs product they call K-G100P for $12.95 but it appears to be one of the liquid products by Caig Labs. It is not even clear if it is a spray can or pen oiler type or whatever.

You could go direct to Caig. http://store.caig.com Their on-line prices look quite reasonable. They have grease forms of lubricant, (I would prefer grease), and the best are L260-N2G for a little 2gm tube or L260N1 for 28gm jar. You would apply these quite sparingly to one side of a contact pair, like on the print head gold plated spots. I would expect that 2gm would go quite a long way when used properly, but the 28gm is more economical.

I have no doubt that Caig Labs knows what they are doing, and that their lubricants will really help, but if you read their literature there is some mis-information and "black magic" in what they say about how contacts and the lubricants work together.

For myself, I trust the long-term experience of the Nye Lubricant company and its synthetic formula products, so tomorrow when they are open for business, I will see what I can obtain from their small quantity outlet.

 

[Tin Ho]

Trigger 37, we are so fortunate that this forum have you. Please keep us informed the outcome of fixing the i560. I have always suspected the reliability of those contacts. I believed that if you clean them you actually ruin them. My first inkjet printer was an HP thinkjet. I cleaned the contacts for the print head which ruined it completely. I agree that using a right lubricant is the way to go.

 

[Trigger 37]

Canonfodder. Thanks for the info. I'll check them both out. I'm going to be at fry's so I can see what their stuff looks like. I'll also check out the web site.

Tin Ho,....Thanks for the kind words,... however, there are many people that believe I'm too long winded and just seem to ramble on. This is true as I tend you use the Keyboard to put down every thought and every clue that comes into my head. Many of the people who come to this web site as newbes are after a quick fix and they don't have to time to read all my babbling, and of course they also can't stand the fact that I can't spell. I wish that this web site would get a spelling checker. This would help me a lot. For all the other work I do on my PC I depended on the spelling checker.

Thanks again.

 

[Tin Ho]

Trigger 37, I don't think anyone on this forum has more experience than you in repairing Canon printers (and other brands as well). Being able to fix 95% of the time is remarkable. Your input to this forum makes this forum most worthy to participate. Thank you.