Alchohol flushes out clotted jet heads.

I wish I could give his name, but thank you to whoever suggested a
paper towel with cleaing "fluid" under the inkjet print heads.

It worked.


This time it was an Epson but I think it would work for anything.

I had tried head cleaning and the other thing several times with no
improvement.

I really hated the idea of buying a whole new printer, and sending it in
to be repaired would probably cost as much, and I thought about
disassembling it but some webpage said you need a calibration CD to get
it right again.

Now I have disassembled some precise things and gotten them back
together by just noting the discolored area where the light hit part and
not the assembled part, and better yet by scribing a scratch the whole
length of the line where the two parts come together, to allign with.
And by being careful about everything, but that was machinery and car
stuff, nothing where the width of a pixel could make a difference.

OTOH, it seems to me that as long as the box holding the 4 ink
cartridges is square, if it's moved a couple pixels to the left or
forward or back, that will just move the image on the paper a couple
pixels but everything will look fine. In this case I would scribe both
on the front or back and the left or right of that box. And I can't
believe I won't get the box square, at least on the second try.

Are the screw-attachment holes elongated or extra large or are they just
the right size?

I also wondered if my use of bootleg ink had caused the problem. The
first set of cartridges worked fine, but when I put in the the second
black one and maybe one other color, it said that the cartidges weren't
recognized. That's anti-bootlegger talk where I come from.

I wondered how I got past the first ones. But when I googled, it said
that Epson printers sometimes gave a Not Recognized message just because
the cartridge was empty. I wonder if they do that on purpose to scare
people like me.

I also wondered why only the yellow came out when I did that test
pattern print, since I had just replaced black, and black had been used
frequently.

OTOH, when I wasnt' printing at all, I was careful to print one picture
in all colors every two months, and since I've been printing a lot of
black and white, I pretty much stopped doing that.

How often do you folks think something in color should be printed to
keep color jets to keep them from drying out??


I used part of a Bounty towel, because they really are the best. They
hold more liquid. Hard to believe that their advertising is so
accurate, but if there is a competitor that does as well, I haven't
noticed it, and I do buy cheaper ones to use with more sludge and
sediment than liquid, or with things that aren't very wet. .

And ammonia was only 1.5 dollars but I didn't know what I would with a
16 oz. bottle after I used a quarter of an ounce, so I skipped that. I
have windex, but it's lost in the jungle that is my house.

And dish soap didn't seem like a good idea to me, though maybe I'm wrong
and in a worse situation I would have needed it.

And somewhere, not here, I read that one had to use 92% alcohol, but
that struck me as silly, so I used the 70% that I already had and which
is quite a bit cheaper. I'm curious where 92% is relly required?
(Alcohol is hydrophilic and the process of detaching the water molecules
from the alchohol is difficult, although I suppose the attached water of
hydration weakens the effect of the alocohol, he said, arguing against
his prior claim that it was silly.)

I tore a strip as wide as the flat area where the heads went, folded it
once over a piece of paper that I used to push everything under the
heads. I should have measured the width of the heads and marked that
on the paper towel, so I'd know when I had it in far enough, because it
was hard to push it in. I will use slightly stiffer paper next time to
better push in the towel, though of course it can't be very thick.

I removed the paper. To allow more of the paper towel to soak up more
alcohol, but it might have been better to at first leave the paper in to
push the upper level of the towel closer to the ink head. Then it
could be removed so that the lower layer of towel could free up its
alchohol into the upper layer.

I found a syringe-like thing that came with some universal ink that I
never managed to use, and now I don't think it's powerful enough?? to
get it in to those new fancy cartridges. At least I only paid half
price, second-hand but never used, at a hamfest.

I poured the alcohol into a cup which was shallow enough that the
"needle" of the bellows thing would reach, then soaked almost to
overflowing the part of the paper towel that still stuck out, almost 2
inches.

I also used the needle to try to put some alcohol into the nozzles from
above, where the cartridges attached, the two colors that were not
working at all, but on this Epson Workforce 645, there is no hole at the
end, rather there is an + shaped cut from the end going down 2 or 3 mm.
And I was relying even more on capillary action to get any alcohol in
there. I didn't see any alchohol running down the outside of the little
black tube, so maybe much of it was getting sucked into the tube.

I waited 20 minutes. The paper was still wet but I was certain a lot
had evaporated and I added about 50% as much as before, or more.

Then waited about 20 or 30 more minutes

Then I put the two new cartridges for those same colors, because the
others were listed as empty. Then I printed a page and it was mostly
red and maybe some other color.

So I cleaned the heads one more time, but then it worked!

And it prints beautiful again.

The previous ink came from Tinte, but Amazon no longer has it and I
can't find it anywhere else. This time I bought something from Office
World, but I haven't used any yet.

Yesterday for the first time, I used the automatic document feeder on a
similar Brother machine and it worked 98% as well as on some big office
machine.

And I should have been able to figure out without watching how a small
machine makes two sided copies, but I didn.t