Big Al
02-12-2010, 01:38 PM
We have several of these that sit in the warehouse most of the time. When we ship them out to a disaster we always test them first. They have been stored with the power on so the heads get cleaned, ink sprayed, heads cleaned then put back in the storage cups every eight hours. This is part of the normal sleep cycle. After ten months of storage the black heads had gotten so clogged we had to replace them.
In a previous post someone mentioned a printing solvent to clean the heads but I never got around to finding it and then lost the note. I tried PB Blaster (TM) today. PB is like WD-40 on steriods, stinky stuff but it works well on rusty bolts. I soaked the plugged heads in a yougart top with a little PB for about three hours and that brought the head up to a level that I could send the printer out if I had to. Plan to soak them longer next week and will follow up on this for anyone interested. The black heads tend to clog first because they have pigment powder but the other colors are just dyes.
Two other printers, stored for eight months also had plugged up black heads. We are going to have to go out there and print something every month or two I guess.
A second printer we tried would not POST. It powered up, the blue light over the power plug came on, (showing the normal motherboard power was OK) the control panel lit up with a rectangular frame and that was it. I tested the power supply, it is a standard 24 pin Pentium motherboard plug, and it was good. Reseated the memory DIMMs and it fired up. We sent it out and have not heard any complaints.
Al
In a previous post someone mentioned a printing solvent to clean the heads but I never got around to finding it and then lost the note. I tried PB Blaster (TM) today. PB is like WD-40 on steriods, stinky stuff but it works well on rusty bolts. I soaked the plugged heads in a yougart top with a little PB for about three hours and that brought the head up to a level that I could send the printer out if I had to. Plan to soak them longer next week and will follow up on this for anyone interested. The black heads tend to clog first because they have pigment powder but the other colors are just dyes.
Two other printers, stored for eight months also had plugged up black heads. We are going to have to go out there and print something every month or two I guess.
A second printer we tried would not POST. It powered up, the blue light over the power plug came on, (showing the normal motherboard power was OK) the control panel lit up with a rectangular frame and that was it. I tested the power supply, it is a standard 24 pin Pentium motherboard plug, and it was good. Reseated the memory DIMMs and it fired up. We sent it out and have not heard any complaints.
Al