First experience refilling and resetting CLI-271 / PGI-270

[PeterBJ]

If it takes a couple of years to develop compatible single use or refillable cartridges and maybe one more year to develop a resetter for a cartridge generation then a planned life expectancy of the printer of two to three years seems a perfect match. When the printer gives up, you will get a printer of a new cartridge generation for which no compatible or refillable cartridges or resetters exist.

I think this is no coincidence.

 

[The Hat]

@RWL, just looking at your nicely drilled hole in the setup cartridge, it occurred to me you may have drilled your hole into the sponge compartment instead of the reservoir side.

If that’s the case then these cartridges will continue to give feed and leak problems, you’ll have to get a set of XL cartridges and start again, but this time drill the hole behind the refill ball over the cartridge number...

 

[stratman]

@mikling - please clear up the confusion in your online versus mailed instructions for drilling the OP's cartridge as I noted in post #9 of this thread.

 

[RWL]

, just looking at your nicely drilled hole in the setup cartridge, it occurred to me you may have drilled your hole into the sponge compartment instead of the reservoir side.

If that’s the case then these cartridges will continue to give feed and leak problems, you’ll have to get a set of XL cartridges and start again, but this time drill the hole behind the refill ball over the cartridge number...

It did indeed enter the sponge chamber. It seemed to straddle the divider between the two chambers with the hole in that location. It's pretty clear now that the plugs and instructions that came with the refilling kit were the wrong ones. With the smaller 1/8" low clearance plugs, you could probably drill closer to the ball's hole and to one side of the center line (i.e. at about 10:00 or 2:00) to avoid the sponge chamber. Having just discovered that hot melt glue can be released with rubbing alcohol, it may be more feasible to just remove the ball for refilling and fill the ball hole with hot melt glue or cover a loosely reinserted ball with hot glue. I discovered the hot melt glue release trick here at PrinterKnowledge and confirmed that it works on metal, wood, and hard plastic myself yesterday afternoon. I haven't tried it on a cartridge yet but will do so on an old cartridge before trying it on a live cartridge I want to refill.

There continues to be slight cross contamination of magenta by cyan as seen in this nozzle check today. Assuming the hot glue removal trick works, I may remove the white silicone plug and repair the damaged cartridges with a dab of hot glue just so that I have a cartridge to put in that place while I figure out whether to discard resetting and get ARC cartridges or get some OEM cartridges and continue refilling. Along the lines of making that decision, I was hoping to get some feedback on the strategy of using ARC cartridges properly in another thread I started. The problem is always having to run the ARC carts dry before they'll reset. @Mike made a comment that the Chinese are finally recognizing the problem this causes (and implied they're allowing earlier resets?), and an eBay chip seller has posted a strategy to get the chips to reset when the carts are about 30% full. If you have comments on ARC carts, please respond in my other thread; It would be better to keep the topics separate so people can find the information they're looking for, particularly if the newer ARC chips have been recalibrated to allow earlier refilling. (I search first but I"m not always successful finding an answer)

 

[mikling]

#1. You don't have to run them empty. There is something called topping up before the chip runs to empty.
#2. These stupid setup carts are designed to be cause anguish.
#3. The 270/271 chips reset when the indicator is LOW. The initial 250/251 did not. When they did that, nobody knows BUT they are catching on to what I have been doing. You think the wholesale sellers have documentation? I introduced the CLI-8 plug to the Canon space. THEN about a couple years later the chinese caught on that they could be used.
#4. The 1/8" plugs are also a pain in the big butt as well. A. They are tiny, everyone complained they could not grip them. They fell off their gingers. B. Again physics again. Study vectors. Their bodies are tapered. That means again combined with the lubricity of ink, there always remained a compressed vector force wanting to push the plugs out of the hole. The clear low clearance ones are straight sided at least on the part they will seal. so on a striagth sided hole they have a higher chance of staying put but on a tapered hole. Vectors again. I see so many people not understanding this as using if it intially fits it works.

I will discontinue selling basic kits. Not worth the aggravation of users trying to refill what was intentionally ntended not to be refilled by Canon and getting into trouble. If you want to refill OEM Canon get some XL carts. NOT the stupid setups.

Clearly it is a case of cross contamination.

What is happening is that even if the plug seals the top the space between the sponge side which is vented to the atmosphere leaks to the puny skinny reservoir side. If you then understand what happens is that the reservoir cannot hold a negative pressure but is always the same as atmospheric pressure. So it will oversaturate the sponge until the reservoir is empty. Then it will behave properly again.

REMEMBER if you bought a resetter to reset the cartridge at LOW, just imagine how fast LOW becomes when the reservoir hardly holds anything. You possibly will waste more ink due to resetting so often than you ever imagined. TYypically on XL and normal carts, you might see the sponge holding about 1/4 to 1/3rd what the reservoir is holding. With the setups, the sponge is holding MORE than the reservoir. So again what is the point of using setup carts to refill and reset. You're spinning your wheels on glare ice.

So anybody on this forum who recommends using OEM should only do so with the proviso that it be done with XL only. With the setups it is an utterly foolish thing to do. Save the bucks from buying an expensive resetter, just get some aftermarkets and be done with it.

 

[RWL]

OK Mike. You convinced me. I just ordered a set of your ARC cartridges because you can refill them when they hit Low which hopefully will alleviate sponge drying and potential print head problems. You'll have to educate me/us about the topping off. I know what you mean by topping off, but I'm not sure when to do that and what the effect is on the counter. On my old 250/251 ARC carts, topping off had no effect. It just delayed the day when they finally ran out of ink and the X came up. If you post an explanation, it would be better to do that in the separate topic on ARC cartridge refilling that I started. The information on filling ARC carts is scattered throughout various posts and it would be better to update it and have it in one place.

At any rate. I did invest some time this afternoon playing with hot melt glue and the starter cartridges so in the next post I'm going to show my results. Briefly, isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol) works as a release agent, but it's more hassle than just pulling the plug on ARC carts and squirting in new ink.

 

[stratman]

They fell off their gingers.

If @The Hat wrote this then it would be something filthy. Even more so if you take into account the 2 sentences prior. Canadians, we know, are polite people.

 

[RWL]

Here are my photos of using hot glue in the ball hole. The glue from my glue gun was not hot enough to melt the plastic of the cartridge, something of concern to me. I confirmed that rubbing alcohol (isopropyl alcohol ~90%) acts as a release agent for hot glue.
Here's what an old 251 cartridge looks like with the ball removed.

Here's a plug of hot glue filling the ball hole. The cartridge was tested and did not leak.

I drizzled alcohol on the glue plug and dug at the edges with my fingernail. The edges released, but it did not easily remove at first, so I dropped another drop of alcohol on it and worked at the edges some more. This time I was able to grab it with my fingernails and pull it out. I had inserted the glue nozzle in the hole and squirted. As you can see, the hot glue made a long conforming plug. The length made it more difficult to remove. Because of this I tried putting the ball back in and putting just a smear of hot glue over the top. The glue removed from the edges of the cartridge, but it was not as easy to get the ball out. Not worth the effort of putting the ball back. I tried a third time with a smaller amount of hot glue so that the profile above the cartridge wasn't very high. The third way with the smaller amount of glue is the way to go. It was easier to remove the plug when it didn't extend so deeply into the ball hole. On some printers with little space above the cartridges, it would be important to have a glue plug with a low profile. None of the three glue plugs allowed leaking out of the outlet hole.

Bottom line. Hot glue works to refill cartridges, but it's not nearly as easy as pulling out the plug on an ARC refillable and squirting in ink. Because of the opaque OEM cartridges, you're guessing at the correct amount of ink.

 

[RWL]

Oh, and I built a hot glue wall in the offending 271 cyan cartridge to fill the hole I drilled and used the ball hole for a refilling area. After putting this cartridge back in the printer, the nozzle check results look as I expect them. No excess of cyan bleeding into the magenta. Whether this will still be true tomorrow morning remains to be seen.

 

[stratman]

Because of the opaque OEM cartridges, you're guessing at the correct amount of ink.

When using opaque cartridges, the forum recommends using a gram scale and knowing the weight of the cartridge when empty and when full. We also simplify the refilling process by equating 1 ml of ink to be equal to 1 gram weight.