Pro-100 Cyan problems

[Grazer5]

I haven't seen anyone posting anything similar to this, so I'm hoping someone can help out.

We've been running into serious trouble with only the Cyans on our fleet of Pro-100's.
Tried different inks, (3), cartridges and they all run into the cyan plugging the head. not a good thing when so many of our jobs have lots of greens and browns!
The only ink that isn't doing it as bad is the OEM Cyan, which is cost prohibitive.
The other 7 colours have no problems???

 

[The Hat]

The only ink that isn't doing it as bad is the OEM Cyan, which is cost prohibitive.

The only obvious thing it could be is the cyan carts may need a good purge to bring them back to new again, but try using one of the other colour cart as a substitute for the problematic cyan carts, just swap over the chip to try it out...
If it works then you have solved your problem..

 

[stratman]

It sounds like ink starvation - failure of ink to flow through and out the cartridge rather than a blocked print head IF inserting a new OEM Canon cartridge resolves the issue.

As The Hat said, flushing the cartridge sponge may resolve the issue. It could be other things.

Describe in detail what inks, what cartridges, how old the cartridges and inks, OEM cartridges or not, refilled or not, method of refilling and any issues with leaking or ink in the air maze or above the sponge, etc.

Run a nozzle check, scan and crop the image and then post.

 

[mikling]

You are using these machines very hard ( In a continuous commercial setting) and you need to be aware of what to do to ease up on the requirements. If you have tried OEM cyan and the problem is "not as bad" then you need to do a couple things. The not as bad might be because the cart is flowing perfectly BUT there is an underlying issue with a film already on the heater.

First...it is required to identify the problem and understand what caused it.

When ink flow is compromised, you start developing a coating on the heaters inside the nozzle. This coating prevents the heater from proper cooling and in facts acts as an insulative layer. So on long heavy jobs when the heaters are working real hard boiling ink out, as soon as you start having the smallest of flow problems you start building up an insulative layer. Once this layer is there and even if you switched to a perfect cartridge, you run the risk that the layer will continue to build up EVEN with a new cartridge.

You need to understand that once the insulative layer appears, the situation can SPIRAL and build exponentially. Here's why. Once the film builds up, it insulates. This insulative layer causes the heater to get hotter. Once it gets hotter it causes the coating to build more and so on.

So suppose you have problems, and use the power clean trick to "clean" the nozzles by flushing with Pharmacists solution. You need to make sure that when it is clean...it is really clean because any remaining deposits there and then subjected to heavy load in that color will cause the same thing to occur again. Here's the thing, once you need to use Pharmacist's solution to clear a head.....it is indicative that you have an underlying problem.

If a small film is there and you continue to print lightly or use the nozzles lightly, then you might find that over time the film "can " actually dissolve and the heater is back good again. In a home setting this can happen. In a commercial setting this is not likely to happen.
Again the key thing is to recognize that the problem was ink flow and once the film builds and subjected to the same heavy load again and again....you are going to have problems.

Now in a production environment where images are repeated over and over and over, for hours on end....you NEED to have carts flowing perfectly AND you need to maintain those carts on a regular basis. There should be NO shortcuts in trying to maximize the useage of the cart till it shows flow problems. By then, your printhead has already built up a good coating on the heaters. So you will need to determine exactly when carts must be pulled and flushed BEFORE ANY problems begin. Think of maintaining a fleet of vehicles...you do not repair them when they break. You must maintain them BEFORE they break so that they don't break. Same thing here.
How to do that? Believe or not some have determined this aspect to a fine science. They know when to pull a set of carts for flushing by weighing the carts AFTER filling and seeing how much ink it will take. Once they cannot absorb or take up a certain amt of ink, they are pulled for maintenance BEFORE they give problems. How much are the weights...that is proprietary data for that printing house but with this method, I am told that using the PC inks, the machine breaks from ink pad filling before the printhead ever needs to be maintained. Printheads do not need to be maintained for the life of the machine. Prior to this they were having hell keeping the printer going until they learned of what I divulged about refilling BEFORE empty. The refill at low or before was a "GAME CHANGER" for them and once they recognized that ink flow MUST be perfect in a commercial setting then the world changed. BTW they run more machines than you are running for longer hours and possibly more days per week. Some on this forum will know who they are but they made refilling into a science and possibly they possibly takes the Guinness world record if it was ever kept.

The very problem you are experiencing is intrinsically what happens with CISS units on Canons. The above also indicates that flushing carts BEFORE they give signs of problems is a must in a commercial setting if you don't want downtime. For the home user, this is not that critical but in a commercial setting printing the SAME heavy load over and over you will need to rethink what needs to be done and change procedure appropriately. All they needed as I had advised them was a visit to Home Depot, some tube, fittings and a run to Walmart or Canadian Tire for a food dehydrator and air compressor. Less than a couple hundred and it changed their world.

The other thing that needs to be done is to review the artwork and see if you can reduce the saturation of the image. You'd be surprised at how much less reducing the saturation will affect the load on a nozzle. This has a larger effect than you might think...a slightly less vibrant picture will ease the load dramatically on the printhead. Depending on the media setting used, this might also assist by spreading the load to other nozzles as well. So two things would happen...less ink demanded by the Cyan AND spreading the load to other carts on lighter tones.

To answer your question, no it is as you have determined, not the ink but the condition of the carts and possibly a not perfectly functioning printhead heater and finally a tweak to the printed image.

 

[Emulator]

The concept of a film or deposit, developing on the heating elements of a Canon printhead is something that I have not read about before, but when you think about it, is quite likely to be a possibility and may explain the behaviour of some faulty printheads, which then progress to burnout.

This opens up a whole new topic on what to do to maintain printheads. Do we keep an additional set of cartridges full of a cleaning solution, which we periodically run on Canon printers as a maintenance procedure??

What would be the best solution to safely remove the deposits and not the heating elements themselves. (We need a "smiley" head scratching)

@mikling you have started a whole new subject

 

[mikling]

I have been occasionally discussing this advanced concept for over10 ten years. Many have not been listening.
Within a home environment, if caught early enough will self heal with as long as the loading is light AND the printer rests between prints. How this happens exactly is not exact but it can. In a commercial continuous print setting, it spells death of the printhead especially if the same condition keeps pounding on the nozzle microsecond after microsecond...thus important to have everything in tip top shape.
For the same reason when a CISS misfeeds all the time, the film starts building until time it it noticed as bad. Kapow.
Printhead designers have known about this since the beginning. I understand the term is kogation
This site more properly describes it. http://www.jnevins.com/inkjetglossary.htm

As usual the aftermarket cartridge tend to cause more flow issues thus the story about them burning out head stems from this effect. They may not all do this but the variance in the quality will allow more to not perform properly and this the probability of bad flow happening is more likely to happen statistically. The OEM lessens the possibility of flow issues from the standpoint of better uniformity of performance. At which point, the point of maintenance is more likely to be predictable.

We all know we cannot beat quality.

In 40 years of electronic building I have NEVER run across a film capacitor that was made in NA fail past infant mortality. Until I got a 250V rated capacitor from China that failed after one year that needed to withstand microvolts and not under heat. Cost me lots of hairs and a day of my life. Now when I see electronic items like printers fail electronically....I just shrug and continue with life. ... Of course there's a reason why there is something called Mil Spec components and why it costs a lot more. When you MUST have something reliable you need to pay for uniform quality.

 

[Emulator]

Yes, found your ref and others which make interesting reading. Perhaps the origin flows from KO = Knock out.

https://glosbe.com/en/en/kogation

"Gradual and inevitable degradation of the print head of a heat-based inkjet printer from residual ink and/or impure water"

 

[turbguy]

Kogation, another reason to consider "Night" or "Quite" mode in a Canon driver, and consider extending the Drying Time between multi-page prints...

 

[Grazer5]

Well....
Mike is correct in the theory of repeating the same image over and over. We've been running some insane jobs lately, one was 10,000 prints!, but I've been doing this for years now and have never run into this. The other colors on some of these jobs are being hit just as hard and they're not failing. The only issue is with the Cyan, and I've used brand new virgin tanks and had it happen.
My associate here thinks that maybe the capping station is at fault, i.e. not sealing properly. I'm starting to think she may have something.

But again. I know running the same image for too long without stopping is death for an inkjet head. I used to work with $1 million dollar UV Flatbeds that would suffer the same problems, albeit much longer run time before failures.

I'm going to have to switch to OEM Cyans for the meantime, BTW I was wrong saying they fail, they don't. We are using a compatible factory filled cart right now and they're showing the problem.

 

[The Hat]

We are using a compatible factory filled cart right now and they're showing the problem.

Sounds like you need to go back to the very start again, because what your doing is all wrong, to get any long-term life out of a Canon print head you need keep it supplied with a good flow of ink always and obviously these compatibles are just not doing the job for you.

Use only new OEM carts/ ink or refill OEM carts with good ink, that’s the only solution, it slow but sure.

I have in the past done 50.000 sheets runs, but I spread the load over 4 or 5 machines which were both A4 and A3 inkjets, I had ink carts all over the place at the time, and finished with no issues, but ink stained fingers...