Epson L210 won't!

[websnail]

With with @Ink stained Fingers on this one... It sounds a lot like the "bleeding" process may have starved the printhead of ink, or you may have introduced a crimp in the feed tubes, blocked the vents or something similar. Mainboard or other electronic issues are very rare without the printer generating an error so I'd definitely be looking to the ink in the buffers/feed block (the moulded block of cartridges over the printhead) and the ink in the tubes...

The trick to re-priming the cartridges manually is to find the vent holes into the ink reservoirs and work out how to seal them as required. Then use some form of adapter or modified syringe to pull ink from the reservoir into each cartridge making sure you seal off the vent hole of the target ink once it has been primed... Repeat for each and then reinstall the feed block before unsealing the vent holes on the reservoirs. With that lot done, you then run a single head clean and you should get your ink flow back.

My guess is that the ink has just rolled back into the reservoirs so the buffers and printhead are just dry... Could be wrong but that's where I'd be looking.

 

[Stuart21]

Thanks all, but still no print - but it does appear to be an electronic / software problem. Test print, head check, print anything, not one pixel!
iWIC status report shows ???

Also, have deleted & updated firmware, just same version etc as before

Grateful for any insights / advice!
Stuart.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

My guess is that the ink has just rolled back into the reservoirs so the buffers and printhead are just dry... Could be wrong but that's where I'd be looking.

I won't assume at this time that the firmware suddenly drops out and deactivates the printer this way, I still think the ink flow is interrupted and impeded one way or the other.

 

[websnail]

Thanks all, but still no print - but it does appear to be an electronic / software problem. Test print, head check, print anything, not one pixel!

I can understand why you might look at it this way but for it to be a software problem the printer would usually chuck up a random error and/or refuse to print/communicate but that's not the case here.

iWIC status report shows ???

View attachment 8571

That would be normal as the L series have no ink monitors and/or chips so the usual chip/ink level messages don't exist.

On balance, I'm going to have to repeat my earlier suggestion of taking the printer partially apart to get at the feed block (the bit that replaces the cartridges as it was a normal printer) and remove it so that you have access to the ink outlets on the feed block. These may well have some visual way of checking ink levels but even if not, using an adapter that fits the outlet and a syringe you should be able to pull any air and ink out of the outlet. If you get a fair amount of air, you'll have found your problem and just need to remove that air from each channel/feeder block before reinstalling into the printer.

Note: While you're pulling ink through into the feed blocks you should be able to gauge if there's any resistance to ink flow (ie: it'll get harder to pull on the syringe). If there is you need to check the ink lines/tubes for anything that is crimping/folding or otherwise stopping the tubing from attaining a natural curve and/or allowing ink to flow.

Assuming you get through all that and it works... yay... If not, then you may be right about the printhead being non-functional but I have my doubts.


One thing I'm pretty darned certain of however is that there is no mechanism in the printer programming to block printing. If such code existed and the OEM's got caught it would be the easiest class action in history and frankly there's way more subtle ways of achieving the same effect.

Hope that is of some use regardless of how you decide to proceed.