Can I unscrew pro9000 print head?

[mikling]

is likely one of the better cleaning tools I have used for declogging heads such as yours. I ran into a similar issue with my Pro9000, since it had sat for months without use.
I had to use the tool shown above to clean it. I also used it to revive an iP3000 that was given to me. The magenta channel was practically hardly printing but now is perfect.

Here are a few warning about using such a tool. I am very careful when pressurizing the head because the printhead nozzle plate is actually glued over a ceramic substrate that is actually an inkwell/trough behind the line of nozzles. if you pressurize it too much, you can delaminate nozzle plate from the ceramic. The result will be ink crossover between adjacent channels. I prefer using a suction with higher pressure if needed. When I cleared the head from the iP3000, I used a number of back and forth cycles to literally scrub the nozzle heaters.

How to make such a contraption: All things needed are available from a well equipped aquarium store. The green tubing is flexible air hose line...the soft rubber type. Now you can attach that to the tip of the syringe and try to attach the other end to the printhead inlet with the rubber washer removed. If your hands are kinda clumsy, it will take some wrangling. To make it easier, you want a rigid attachment to hold onto while trying to fit it onto the inlet. The aquarium store has such an item. They will carry a rigid 3/16" line. that fits into the airline tubing. This allows coupling or joining the tubing as well. Well, all you need then is to cut about 3/4" length of soft tubing. This will be placed at the end of the rigid line, leaving about 1/4" of the soft tubing exposed. This exposed end will then be attached to the inlet. You can leave whatever length of rigid tubing that you like and then put some airline tubing over that end and attach the syringe.

Now here's the good part. If you leave the attachment on the inlet, you can place windex into the column and just let gravity pull the windex through the printhead without using a head cleaning routine. This gently cleans the printhead out with no risk of over pressure. If you want more capacity use a syringe to flow 10cc slowly though the printhead.

It's worked for me, hope it does the same for you.

 

[stratman]

Nice, mikling.

What are the dimensions of the green tubing?

 

[mikling]

The ID I think is 3/16" or little smaller as it has to fit the 3/16"OD rigid tube inside where the green tubing is joined.

Now here is where it will get interesting. Once I cleaned the printhead and then reinstalled it without the disc seals around the inlet. Reinstalled the carts and the printer worked perfectly......WITHOUT the disc washers that are supposed to seal. Needless to say when I noticed the discs were missing because I noticed them out of the printer I put them back in.

Now this is where the thinking cap must come on. If you are familiar with the seals to the inlet on Epson printers, you will notice immediately that the seals on these Canon printheads do not come close to providing as good a seal. Also judging by my noting that the printhead can still work without the seals, a thought that perhaps the function of the seal is not exactly as many think.

If you look closely at how the Canon cartridge works and then look at the outlet and the way it mates to the printhead there are air voids that are not refilled with ink. Furthermore the seals are not high pressure. So what makes the ink come down to the printhead is surface tension/capillary effects and not necessarily the pressure as such. Again, my printer worked without the seal.
So I think that the seal is really to prevent drying of the cartridge/inlet interface and not much more. It was never meant to be a pressure seal.

You see, I have had other Canon printers that have gone for months with no use and they fired up again. So why do some not do the same?

Also, let's think about what happens if the seal does not seal perfectly while the printer is at rest. Ink will evaporate and it could do so where the disk seal is compromised. When drying, it could actually pull the ink from the nozzles UP towards the inlet screen and dry off there, This will remove ink from the nozzles and eventually the ink column will break and cause the remaining ink in the nozzle to dry out. This can cause a clog and a bad one too because it can then become not thickened ink but dry ink. I have an iP6600D ( mini 9000) that sat in storage for over 6 months with no use.... in near freezing for three months. Started back up fine. I also put away many other printers for many months that did the same. Sometimes, it does not go well. So if the disc seal did not seal then maybe just maybe that is the issue that causes the clog to be found upon start-up. The drying of the ink will leave a concentrated gunk at the interface where it has dried.

Looking at the seal, you can see that it is possible for it to flatten/distort and not seal the bottom ridge of the cartridge well. If the printer is in constant use, enough ink would flow through that the slow drying is not going to cause any issue but maybe when it is at rest over an extended length of time, it has the potential to cause problems.

Food for thought.

 

[rodbam]

Thanks Grandad & Mike The colours in the nozzle print were altered added contrast to show the lines better as the PM is lighter than the M. I have only used the syringe & tube on one other colour inlet to see if the spray pattern looked the same & they seemed similar & about the same pressure required. I've only been using a short piece of tube but I will put a longer piece on & remove the seals.
I'm going to order a new head even if it only gets use as a spare, is there any problem with me buying from the States as their electricity is 110v & we are 240v down here?
Here's the latest nozzle print & it doesn't look much better after a further nights soak in Windex (3 nights now) & syringing Iso alcohol through. It seems to take some fair pressure to get any flow through the head so I hope it doesn't damage the head as Mike indicated, I might do more sucking than blowing in case. It would be good if we could take the small filter screens off the ink inlet stubs so all the gunk can get sucked out. It seems the only way for a clog to be cleared is for it to dissolve. Which would dissolve ink better, Windex or Iso alcohol? So far I have only left it overnight in Windex, should I leave it overnight in Iso alcohol instead?
A new head from the States I saw in Grandads link was about $130 including postage whereas I found one down here for almost $250.
Thanks all for the advice & I notice the new nozzle check shows the lines have changed places with wider one under the thin one this time but looking to be in the same places.

 

[Emulator]

Has anyone tried ultrasonic cleaning?

There are many relatively low cost units - look at Amazon.

 

[Grandad35]

Has anyone tried ultrasonic cleaning?

Read this post first.

....snip.... is there any problem with me buying from the States as their electricity is 110v & we are 240v down here?

The transformer in the printer converts the 110/220 VAC to the appropriate DC voltages, so the print head doesn't see any difference. Since the print head has the same part number, they are interchangeable.

Which would dissolve ink better, Windex or Iso alcohol?

With no proof to back this up, I believe that the ammonia in Windex is more effective in loosening a thin layer of hardened ink residue from the ceramic print head surfaces, but that alcohol is more effective in dissolving large globs of dried ink. Single nozzle clogs are usually of the thin layer type, while clogs of multiple nozzles would be expected to be of the large glob type. In any case, it wouldn't hurt to do a syringe purge with Windex (be sure that it is the "original formula" with ammonia).

If you end up with a new print head, you have nothing to lose by disassembling your current print head as described in the link given in a previous post. By holding the ceramic plate up to a strong light, you may be able to see the blockages. Remember that the blockage that I had in my original post wasn't ink at all, but probably some assembly adhesive that broke free (I was getting zero ink flow from any nozzle). It is possible that your blockages aren't ink at all. I agree that it would be nice to remove the inlet screens, but this appears to be a destructive test.

Has all of this cleaning improved the banding problem? When printing in photo mode, my i9900 only advances the paper by 1/8 of the print head width to use a different part of the print head for each pass specifically to average out small areas of missing nozzles. Given how light these bands have become, I would expect that your bands would now be almost invisible.

 

[mikling]

There is no point in trying to remove the inlet screen. Under the screen is fibrous material similar to what is at the outlet of the cartridge itself. If you remove the screen, it will likely be destructive as replacing it perfectly could be difficult.

The other point to note is that I once had a similar small band that no nozzle cleaning could cure. It went away after a few days....I suspect that it might have been trapped air. This was on my an i9900. Try just leaving it alone for a couple days with the cartridges on and see what comes out of it.

 

[rodbam]

Yes the banding is less now & can only be seen in certain darker areas whereas before I saw it in lighter areas as well. I will try leaving a tube full of Iso Alcohol on the PM inlet tube overnight just to try something different then do as Mike said & let it rest for a couple of days. The new printhead is about $150 as I made a mistake with the postage in my earlier post. Anyhow this will teach me to make sure I run off a print every few days & not let it sit unused for a month like this time.
I've just tried another type of print & the banding looks quite bad. The banding seems to look a lot worse than the nozzle check would indicate so I hope Grandad's suggestion of an electrical fault isn't the problem. Would the electrical fault tend to be in the printhead or the printer, well I suppose I mean what is the most common? If it's in the printer I'm stuffed.

 

[Grandad35]

Electrical problems tend to the loss of a half or full bank of nozzles, not narrow bands like yours. Also, electrical problems don't move or improve with cleaning.

I would not leave the alcohol in the print head for an extended period. There is a rubber seal between the plastic and ceramic parts that may not like long term contact with alcohol. That's why I wrote to purge the alcohol with water before blowing it out with air - to dilute any remnants of the alcohol that might remain in the channels.

 

[mikling]

Grandad35, good thing you mentioned something about the caution about using alcohol. I am not sure its effect on the glues used internally. Windex I believe has some alcohol content as well but I suspect not in sufficient strength to cause problems. I have used Windex for over a week on a printhead once with no bad side effects.