Unclogging Canon Printheads

[Trigger 37]

aaronthink,... first, ghwellsjr has provided good answers. However, I would add some more details. If you could you should post a picture of you best nozzle check. Seeing that image will give us a much better idea of the real problem. To give yourself a better picture of exactly how many and which nozzles are clogged, go into Service Mode and print a Service test pattern. This will show you each and every nozzle,..not just a BAND of one color. Now that you have this you can proceed as follows;

The problem with the HOT Water Cartridge clean method is that you need to modify and make a cleaning cart for all inks, since the purge cleaning cycle will suck ink from all of them at once. While this may be the best way to clean the head I would suggest that you first do a "Flush & Soak" cleaning as I has posted in this thread on August 04. Flush and clean the head as instructed and make sure you dry it. You may want to let it soak overnight, then hot flush it one more time. Dry it completely and re-install the inks and head and print only a nozzle test print and then go back into Service Mode and print another Service Test print. Compare this last print with the older one to see if there has been any improvement. Since you can see EVERY NOZZLE you know which ones are clogged. If there has been some improvement, then I would proceed with making Cleaning ink Carts and doing printer cleaning cycles. If you see very little or no improvement, then it can be as ghwellsjr posted, those nozzle could be dead.

On the issue of "Turning the power on/off. The primary failure mechanism of all semiconductors is "Thermal Fatigue". What this means is that inside the tiny chip, the first thing to fail is not the semicondutor substrate and transistors,... it is always the printed electrical wiring and the tiny thermal bonds between two connections internally. Sometimes this is a tiny bit of wire between the PAD on a chip and the PIN that exits the side of the substrate. As you turn the power on, the chip begins to heat up and eventually it gets pretty hot. Later when you turn the printer off, all the chips COOL down. Thermal Fatigue is what happens between two dissimilar metals and is the result of the difference in the "Coeffecient of Thermal Expansion". This means that different metal expand at different rates to changing temperature. This causes one to expand faster than the other and build up stress if the two are connected or touching. After many thermal cycles (Turning on and off) eventually the stress of the connection causes fractures. Then sooner or later the connect is broken and the chip fails. Each nozzle has one independant electrical connection. It may not be that is is BURNT out, just that the electrical connection has failed.

To add even more confusion to this, Canon has built into each and every printer a complex Time Keeper whick keeps track of how many hours it has been since something was printed. It keeps this regardless if you turn the machine on or off. If it has been over 12 hours since you last printed anything, and you turn the printer on, it will automatically do a head cleaning and dump a very large amount of ink down into the waste pads. The amount of ink is listed in the Service Manual and I have estimated that you could have printer 10+ nozzle test patterns and still use less ink than what is dumped in each cleaning. So the answer is, don't turn your printer off, and print a nozzle test print everyday.

I hope this has answered your question.

 

[martin0reg]

..Canon has built into each and every printer a complex Time Keeper whick keeps track of how many hours it has been since something was printed. It keeps this regardless if you turn the machine on or off. If it has been over 12 hours since you last printed anything, and you turn the printer on, it will automatically do a head cleaning..

As you say the printer keeps track regardless of turning on/off. So I think it will do head cleaning also regardless of turning on/off...

 

[Trigger 37]

Martin,... I don't think you get it. The act of "Turning the Printer ON" triggers the action to check the clock. If the printer is on it continues to wait. I will never initiate a cleaning action just out of time. However, If you leave it on and 12 hours has elapsed since you printered anything, then it will still do a clean cycle. How ever, if it has been 24 hours or 36 hours or 5 days since you printed anything, the it will still do a cleaning cycle, but only one. Even if you request to print only a nozzle test print. So the last thing I do before I go to bed is print something, even if it is only a nozzle test. The first thing I do in the morning is print some email or at least a nozzle test print. Otherwise you are just wasteing ink.

The point is you can not totally avoid the built in cleaning cycles,...but you can minimize them.

 

[msmart]

So the last thing I do before I go to bed is print something, even if it is only a nozzle test. The first thing I do in the morning is print some email or at least a nozzle test print.

Or set up a scheduled task batch job to do it automatically:

http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3977

 

[aaronthink]

Hi! many thanks for your advises. since now my printer will be ON all the time.

thats a nozzle check, the last one I've just done:

You can see a little little clog on the cyan. Maybe its not important.

I think now Im going to keep on printing normaly, because the quality is perfect enough for me. And i will take care of not turn off the printer. I have fear to flush and soak the new print head because, my last experience (with the old one) was that some colors got worse. Maybe it is because the tap water from my city is so "hard". Anyway always i finish the proceses with soaking completely with distiled water.

The woman who sold me the new print head told me that it has defect, so it should be electrical defect for the black text nozzle. but thats not a problem for me now.

By the way, I'm still trying to unclog my old print head. I'm goind to spend one week, with patience, soaking with all the diferentes method that i know: hot distilled water, comercial printhead cleaning solution, amonia+ water, etc. I'm going to soak it all those nights, and I had made a couple of syringes to force liquids pass through the nozzles. I'm trying aswell with vinager (It might dont do nothing, but just trying something new because i dont have nothing to lose).
I have discarted some methods as ultrasonics, compresed air, or unscrew another time the screws from the head.

Bye!

 

[ghwellsjr]

You have to be careful when you have only one printer when you are trying to work on a second print head because what are you going to do with your working print head? If you just take it out of the printer, you will probably get some clogged nozzle from the ink drying out. That means that you need to clean it out too.

Personally, I think it is an unnecessary risk. I would just leave your first print head out of the printer until such time that your working one fails and you want to switch to your first print head. The safest place for any print head is in a printer (unless you are shipping it).

 

[davec]

I will echo the not turning off advice, my MP500 is 5 years old now and has been on all of that time....never a problem. Photo printed over 1500 CDs, 100s of photos and perhaps 10000-15000 pages. Same print head, original cartridges refilled for the last 5 years, no waste ink absorber message, although I have reset that a few times, but even if I had not, I don't think the message would have come up more than once.

 

[Trigger 37]

aaronthink,... As I said, you could go into service mode and print the service test pattern to give a detail view of the print status of each and every nozzle. It would be interesting if you would post that pattern.

 

[aaronthink]

hi trigger! I think My printer (canon pixma ip4500) dont has that option from the maintenance menu. do you know another way to print this service test pattern?
thanks!

 

[JimDandy]

Slightly changing topic, I have an MP610 with what seems like an irreparable clog in the pigment black chamber. I've tried many variations on cleaning with warm/hot water, isopropyl, and ammonia-based window cleaner (which seems the best at getting ink loose, FWIW), and the PH still works but I never get the grid in my test pattern and I basically can't print black text. Anyway, here are my two questions (though I figure someone may have other things to say to me about my efforts!):

1) I've found two PH replacement numbers, QY6-0067-000 and QY6-0075-000 (many sites list this as the replacement for the aforementioned P/N). Does anyone know if the 0075 is in any way different, better, or worse than the 0067? Are these just arbitrary Canon numbers, or do they reflect a difference in design?

2) From my symptoms, is it possible that the purge system isn't working right? I'm pretty sure I'm losing ink on clean cycles, which would suggest it's working. I guess I'm not entirely clear from looking over other threads whether there's a separate purge for pigment black only, and maybe it's not working.

BTW, I've been doing refills (successfully until recently), but I went and bought a new CLI5BK, just in case that was an issue. No difference.

Going to heed advice on here about leaving the printer on 24/7 or setting up batch jobs. I'm just too scatterbrained to make sure I manually print something on a regular basis.

Thanks.