Cleaning

[Lucid]

I'm a noob at this... I have some not too old HP cartridges I was thinking of trying to refill. What kind of chemical do you need to use to clean up after yourself when refilling?

Inks are mostly waterbased right, so I'm hoping you don't need some sort of heavy solvent to clean up after yourself. Do you use the same chemical to flush out the cartridge before refilling it?

Also when surfing for inks I see a lot of lawsuits coming from HP and Epson... are they about just the remanufacturing of cartridges, or are they going after ink mfgs too?

AP

 

[mikling]

Hp is going after inkmfrs that "copy" their patents on Vivera ink.

 

[Manuchau]

Wear an apron, old clothes and use rubber gloves.....that should help as you get used to refilling.

 

[ghwellsjr]

Bleach is the only cleaner that I have seen recommended for cleaning ink off your hands. It works great for dye inks but be very careful with pigment black ink, it is very difficult to get off. My boss thought I had been working on my car!

Ammonia [Please don't use ammonia--just use Windex with ammonia] is another cleanser that has been recommended for unclogging print heads. I suppose it might work with HP cartridges but then you would have the problem of cleaning out the ammonia. I really don't know how to clean and refill HP cartridges. If you emptied them yourself, you probably don't need to clean them, just refill them as soon as you can so the nozzles don't dry out.

I did learn that there is a special tape that you can use to cover the nozzles of HP and other cartridges. The trick is to wet the tape with water before applying it.

My first printer was an HP which used two cartridges, a three-color and either a black or another three-color photo cartridge. I bought all three which was a big mistake because one of them is always out of the printer and will dry up the nozzles. If I had known about the special tape, I may have avoided these problems but if I had to do it over, I would not have use the photo cartridge and only used the two cartridges in the printer and refilled as needed.

[NOTE: I have learned my lesson about using ammonia. I now use just Windex (with ammonia). Read the following link for more information:

http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1396
]