This is a return post for Grandad 35 from the filling bci-6 thread
but thought it better served under this thread because it may or may not help
inkdoodle so brace yourself this may be a long post.
Let me start by giving you a short history of my refilling experience
18 months ago I installed a canon s9000 an i865 an epson 1290 for photo printing and various hp and
lexmark printers for our office.
While the bulk of our digital printing is done on a hybrid noritsu
photo minilab I still enjoy printing with inkjet especially custom
black and white prints,it soon became very obvious that refilling carts
was the only way to go and this is a lot of fun on its own especially
the the part where you get to stick your middle finger up at a few multi-national companies intent on ripping consumers off. After a few months of hand filling for myself,friends and customers with varing degress of success,I decided if we were going to do it as a business we would do it properly so after many late nights combing the web for equipment I settled on the speedbrite machine,it is reasonably priced and imported to Australia by by my ink suppler Ausjet (ausjetinks.com.au).
Most refilling machines all seem to all operate around the same principle of a vacuum
chamber fed by ink lines into the chamber via external syinges,the speedbrite
uses the same pump to switch over to an evacuation/priming station
which uses those snap on priming clips mounted on the machine and goes to a waste bucket.
The only difference I could see between all these machines were thier
level of production,visit
www.rjettek.com from inkdoodles post to see some serious equipment.
All these machines also seem to revolve around hp lexmark carts with built in heads with no mention of canon carts,or epson for that matter,so I'm assuming these are hand filled.The instructions supplied with the speedbrite are vague at best and a little ambiguous in places however with a little trial and error well actually a lot of trial and error I have a I have arrived at a filling procedure that is producing 100% percent rate
"so far" I say so far because other web sites talk of return rates so I'm expecting some and I constantly
ask people for feed back.
OK my procedure to fill hp lexmark carts are to
1: Soak the the head in windex or head cleaning fluid for 10 minutes
or for really dryed up heads steam with an humidifier as well.
2: vacuum evacuate the cart with vacuum for 5 minutes,this could probably
be manually done with a snap on primer and a syinge,then weigh the
cart to its empty weight with electronic scales,weights were supplied to
me by Ausjets refilling manual and well worth the $100 albiet a manual for hand filling.
It,s worth noting here that drying the cart for 24 hours on carts that
have stopped accepting ink may be worthwhile I notice on rjettek's web
site they actually sell an oven for this purpose and given my previous
success on filling canon bone dry carts it seems this a legitimate refilling
technique.
3: load the syinges with the correct ink to the amount required,place
the cart with head seal in the vacuum chamber insert the corresponding
needles to there chambers by either pushing through the labels as with
hp 56 57 carts or remove the tops from some some hp lexmark carts,close
and lock the chamber and presurise or as the case may be depresurise
the chamber to about 20hg release the stop cock on the external
syinge and watch it empty into the cart "no air"
It is at this stage that I differ with instuctions I,m basically
a lazy person and I don't like cleaning lines after every refill
so I vacuum the cart for 5 mins then slowly hand fill with a syinge,
its working to date.
4: PRIME the head this is a very important step not doing this was the
cause of my early failures. vacuum filling or slow hand filling
may fill the sponge but not the head or the small resivour that
sits atop the head.I do this by either putting the the cart back
on the evacuation dock for a few seconds or use a vacuum tube
with a suction cup. manually this could be done by hand centrifuging
or wicking ink out onto paper towels
5: Dab test on paper towel I consider 6 dabs with solid ink bars marks
a pass if not I re-soak,re-steam re-prime the head until this is achieved
and in some severe cases starting over again.
6: Aviod giving a customer the same hp cart back given hp printers three cart memory
Whew! but I haven't finished yet.
None of this however applies to Epson or Canon bci carts
Epson carts are vacuum chambered to dispel any potential air locks and turned upside down
and bottom filled until ink emerges from the vent hole being bottom filled
this solves filling the resivour near the exit port and all newer Epson carts
have a valve gate to stop leakage having said that the epson C64 R210/310
carts have a very complex syponing system of ink feeding and generally regarded
as not refillable however the chinese are even cleverer here they simply duplicated
the cartrige shape but internally are just sponge or a sponge resivour arrangement
so after selling our clients there new "refillable" cart at half the price of
an original all is OK and I'm a good guy again.
Canon bci carts are the easiest of all carts to refill, they are hand filled the way you
folk are already doing although I,m a believer in not disturbing the manufacturers
fill holes I drill and seal another hole with hot wax and small square of black
dymno labeling tape to complete the seal ,it looks neat and easy to remove for refilling.
I think Canons ease of refilling and cart size may be the reason for them out selling other
brands two to one,kinda like Microsoft over Mac,give people access and choices.
For the benifit of Grandad35 I did experiment with vacuum filling a Canon bci cart
so I chose my most stubborn cart,always seems to be light magenta for me,it was placed
in the vacuum chamber exit port sealed(orange clip and rubber band) feed line into the resivour
it proceeded to fill the sponge then sprayed out the vent hole,No resiviour fill h'mm
next same thing but with vent hole sealed, perfect a super saturated sponge completly
full then the resivour filled but oops to much ink being fed managed to clean that up
but it was successfull,hand filling is much easier I'll reserve that technique for special cases.
tried the same arrangement outside the chamber,ink to the resivour with a syinge tightly
held in resivour hole, vacuum applied over the sponge by hand vacuum line, again sponge filled but
continued to suck ink out the vent and not fill the resiviour.I suspect the factory do something
similar,apply a vacuum to sponge,inject ink into the resivour after a measured amount the vacuum is shut
off and the resivour is continued to be filled by injection until full,maybe but short of kidnapping a Canon
employee I'll never know
I'll keep hand filling for the moment.
And finally before I finish a word to inkdoodle,I think that a vacuum system would
do what a centfuge would do but be more vesitile and I can attest to that,vacuum is way more
fun,same as an utlrisonic head cleaner that almost cost me $800 is no better than windex and
cheap humidifier unless your doing a couple hundred carts a day.
I aplogise now for any spelling errors,it was late at night and I always have problems spelling resivour
and any formating problems, this was written in notepad over several days.
I suspect in trying to keep this short I've posed more questions than I've answered but I am
sincerly looking forward to posts from any professional or amatuer refillers that can advance
this knoble cause,perhaps collectivly an E-book could be written.
Many Regards
Craig Ross
