Freedom Refill Method for Canon BCI 3, 5, 6 & CLI 8 & PGI 5 and others

[ThrillaMozilla]

Somebody made a point that that pump appears to be a centrifugal pump for liquids (slapping self in forehead). I believe that's right. They say it pumps 4.5 L/minute. Yep, that's for liquids. It might work for gases too, but not if it's a centrifugal pump. And any other type of small pump that has that kind of modest vacuum limit would probably not have have that much capacity.

That looks like absolutely the wrong kind of pump. Use a syringe.

 

[Emulator]

PeterBJ
I think you dismiss windshield wiper pumps too quickly. It may be that the BMW pump is a centrifugal pump, but this type I use for filling and emptying liquids, is an all plastic, gear type and has a good performance. Pumping action is reversed by switching the electrical polarity.

Click to enlarge.

http://www.wiperblades4u.co.uk/universal-12v-washer-pump-ewp13.html#idTab

Testing this particular pump running dry, it was able to drawn up 400mm height of water in a vertical plastic tube.
Discharge pressure with liquids 43psi.
Pumping water out of an air reservoir it would probably provide quite a useful source of suction.

 

[The Hat]

IS it me or what because I think youre all trying to reinvent the wheel again?

For 2 you can use a perfectly good eco friendly (No power need) 60 ml syringe
thats demonstrated by ghwellsjr in his video and more to the point it works too.

ghwellsjr signature I used to vacuum fill Canon cartridges with Inktec ink and then I converted to a modified German method
but now I use my Freedom Refill Method. It does not modify the cartridge: no holes, no screws, no plugs, no tape. Refilled cartridges look just like OEM.

You've completely lost me on this one guys..

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

Emulator, 400 mm is almost nothing. You need 5 meters of vacuum to remove half the air.

 

[Emulator]

You are looking down the wrong end of the tube.
300Kpa is 43 psi, more than enough to operate mechanically linked syringes and provide all the suction you need.
It is just a question of whether the quantities would justify the effort to make a working system and cut out the manual effort.

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

OK, let's try this again.

Testing this particular pump running dry, it was able to drawn up 400mm height of water in a vertical plastic tube.

400 mm is not a useful vacuum for any kind of vacuum filling. Run wet, if it is capable of putting out 43 psi, then maybe it will pull a strong vacuum, but the plumbing also gets a little more complicated. You may also need to be careful not to do any damage.

 

[PeterBJ]

The maximum suction you can get from an ideal pump is 1 bar or 100 kpa or 14.7 psi, which is able to lift a column of water 10 metres. A real pump often only produces half that suction. The output pressure can be very high, gear pumps are often used to power hydraulics, but suction is what is needed for refilling.

So I think the windshield washer pumps are no good as vacuum pumps, whether they are the centrifugal or the gear type. The diaphragm(?) pump linked to by Smile, produces much better suction, claimed to be 85 kpa which corresponds to 8.5 metres of water.

 

[barfl2]

I like the principles of the Freedom method but personally cannot achieve consistent results. Some carts fill easily others seem to fill the syringe full of inky bubbles (IS Ink) and as I have a painful shoulder anyway I have returned to the German method filling my carts in seconds and somehow I seem to have overcome the poor cart feeding I and other German Method users experienced.

I also looked at some form of pump and converted a tyre compressor but when connected to the cart the remaining inky contents proceeded to go back to the compressor which of course is only intended to handle air not liquid. Perhaps with a 3 way valve and the contents going into a separate container it could be done. Normally you would be extracting air from say bagging a fibre glass/epoxy moulding.

However is it worth it unless you are refilling considerable quantities of carts.

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

PeterBJ, depending on the construction, if the intake side is vacuum-tight, you may be able to get a good vacuum with a pump designed for liquids. The trick is to keep the pump filled with liquid. It's all in the plumbing.

Emulator, if you run your pump dry, you will probably burn up the rotors.

Some carts fill easily others seem to fill the syringe full of inky bubbles (IS Ink)....

This is a problem with the method. The foam is created by the outlet filter on the cartridge. To compensate, you need to add extra ink to the syringe and wait a few seconds while some of the foam subsides. Some brands of ink are much worse than others in this respect.

I also looked at some form of pump and converted a tyre compressor but when connected to the cart the remaining inky contents proceeded to go back to the compressor which of course is only intended to handle air not liquid.

WIth a pump you definitely need some extra plumbing. It's common practice to protect a vacuum pump with a trap, and you'll probably need a valve.

 

[PeterBJ]

barfl2 wrote:

...I have returned to the German method filling my carts in seconds and somehow I seem to have overcome the poor cart feeding I and other German Method users experienced...

If you have solved the problems with German method refilling the newer windowed and opaque Canon cartridges please post your findings in this thread: http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=8208&p=1 . I'm sure this will be of great interest to many German method refillers, including me.

ThrillaMozilla wrote:

PeterBJ, depending on the construction, if the intake side is vacuum-tight, you may be able to get a good vacuum with a pump designed for liquids. The trick is to keep the pump filled with liquid. It's all in the plumbing.

I know. At my work at a paint manufacturing plant I have used a lot of xylene and other solvents to prime pumps. A gear type pump that is worn has very little suction if it is not filled with liquid.

Gear pumps are only suitable for liquids, so wouldn't it be difficult to design a system to keep the pump filled with water and also allowing the pump to suck air. Wouldn't air stop the pumping?

Maybe an ejector powered by compressed air is the best choice of pump, if a type can be found that handles liquids as well as air. But ink sucked out by a pump represents a loss, so I find ghwellsjr's original idea hard to beat, unless you want to refill at a large, maybe commercial scale.

See this thread for a commercial system powered by compressed air driven ejector.: http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=7453&p=1 I think the performance is not impressive. The sponges overfill with ink in the vent area, and the ink reservoir is not completely filled. Also compressors are noisy.

For a pump driven refiller to work satisfactorily I think it must be able to fill the cartridge in one operation, else I think this method is much more cumbersome than the use of a syringe.

I think that the pump driven one operation freedom refill could be compared to traditional vacuum refill, so I did a test. I modified a bicycle pump into a vacuum pump by reversing the piston and adding a bicycle ball valve to the air outlet that now serves as air inlet. This modified pump is able to create a negative pressure of 560 mm Hg or approximately 75 kpa, meaning 25% air is left. I used a glass jar with a vacuum meter and two pieces of plastic tubing mounted in the lid and sealed with hot melt glue. My attempt to refill a BCI-6 cartridge was not very successful, the sponge chamber was overfilled with ink in the vent and the ink chamber was only filled between 50% and 75%. The cartridge looked very much like that in this post: http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=52229#p52229 .

This is my vacuum refiller:

I think a better pump will fill the ink reservoir more, but you will still have problems with the sponges overfilling and getting ink in the vent area. I find that ghwellsjr's Freedom method refill with a syringe is better and much more elegant.

So please, Smile, if you successfully used your modified car tire compressor to refill, how did you refill? Modified Freedom method or traditional vacuum method? and what were your results?