How to Kill your Canon Printhead

[Zap]

I just thought that I might pass on this little thing that happened to me.

A long post

I have multiple Canon ip4200 printers. My wife has one, I have one, and we have a spare. Mine and my wife's printers have very heavy use, the spare just sits there most of the time and I print something on it from time to time just so it does not drop dead.

After wearing out the print heads on my wife's computer, we recently replaced it with a new print head, then I was not able to keep the print head in my printer working I also just replaced the Print head with a new one. The print head in the spare printer was acting up, constantly clearing what appeared to be plugged up nozzles, it started having ragged holes in the black pgi-5bk nozzle pattern, then after attempting to deep clean it, I lost all of the black nozzle pattern. No amount of cleaning would help.

At this point knowing that I would also have to buy another print head, I thought that I had better make sure that it was the print head that failed and not the circuit board. So I swapped the print head from my good printer into the spare, and put the print head from the spare into my good printer. Well I think that you are guessing what happened. The known good print head in the spare printer now printed a nozzle check pattern in the spare printer, but it was very ragged with holes throughout the pattern, just as it did before the old print head failed. And the print head that was taken from the spare printer and was put in my good printer, failed to print any nozzle check pattern on the black.

So I said to myself, well that proves that the print head of the spare was dead. So I switched both print heads back to the original places, figuring that I did have to buy a new print head for the spare printer. But oh Woe is me, when I put the known good print head back into my good printer, It continued to print out the same ragged nozzle print check pattern that it did in the spare printer.

My brand new print head now has very ragged holes in the nozzle check and will not clean up. My spare printer must have burned out a bunch of nozzles in the print head as soon as it was put in. Now I will have to buy another print head for my good printer and put this new blown print head into my spare printer. I doubt that I could ever trust a new print head in the spare ever again.

I think that I have shown that it is a bad circuit board. I recently had to replace the power supply on the spare printer because it suddenly stopped, refusing to boot up the printer. When it went it must have caused damage to the circuit board.

It has always been an advantage to be able to swap out parts between printers in order to prove out a problem. So it was a surprise to see this happen.

Has any one else had a similar occurance?

Jack

 

[ghwellsjr]

Yes, it is a known problem that a burned out print head in one printer can damage the printer and if you swap parts like you did, the problem can propagate. In other words, a really bad print head can burn out any printer you put it in and a really bad printer can burn out any print head you put in it.

However, I don't think this is the problem in your case and I would not give up yet. Usually when a print head is really burned out (so that it can damage a printer), it won't print anything. Also, less severe electrical problems in the printer or in the print head usually cause patterns of "clogged" nozzles, like maybe half of them won't print or a couple columns of the grid pattern won't print. When you see random nozzles not printing, which is what I think you mean by "ragged holes in the nozzle check", that is almost always caused by ink flow problems which is also called clogged nozzles.

Before continuing, I want to warn you not to print anything with these print heads except a nozzle check until you fix the problem because Canon printers use tiny heaters to boil the ink to eject it out the nozzles and they require the fresh flow of ink to keep everything cool. If you do normal printing, you run the risk of damaging individual heaters in a random pattern and once this happens, it cannot be fixed.

I also want to warn you not to try to clean the print head outside of the printer. Getting liquid into the electronics of the print head and then powering it on is the quickest way to kill a print head and maybe a printer. Let the printer do its own cleaning if at all possible.

So, to continue, there is a good chance that the problem with your spare printer is that the purge/prime/cleaning system is not working. This consists of a couple small "foam looking" pads that lift up to contact the bottom of the print head when it parks off to the right. They suck on the bottom of the print head to get the ink flowing from the cartridges, through the print head and out the nozzles. The one on the left is for the large pigment black ink cartridge and the one on the right is for all of the smaller cartridges for the color (including photo black) dye inks. I think you are having a problem with the pigment black purge system.

Here's what you can do: open the cover to your printer and wait until the print head stops in the middle. Take a flashlight and look off to the right where the print head parks and look for these two pads. The one on the right is usually easier to see but once you spot it, you can usually find the one to its left. Take some Windex or other liquid window cleaner (or just plain water if you don't have any) and using a syringe, eye dropper or a pinched straw, deposit some of the liquid on these two pads. Make sure it remains there and doesn't drain away. Now close the cover and wait for all the motors to stop. Then open the cover again and look at the two pads. Has the liquid been sucked away?

If it has, then you know the purge system is working. If it hasn't, then you need to get it working again before doing any more cleaning cycles because you aren't really doing cleaning cycles without a working purge unit.

There are several things that can cause the purge unit to not work. If one of the pads doesn't work but the other one does work, then you know the purge pump is not broken (which is kind of rare). The mechanisms of failure for one pad are:
1) The tubing has come loose that connects to the bottom of the rubber tray that the pad sits in.
2) The tubing has itself become clogged with thick ink deposits.
3) The "foam" pad itself has become clogged with thick ink deposits.

Number 3 is the easiest to fix, so let's hope that is the problem. Open the cover and after the print head stops in the middle, unplug the printer so that it will not get in your way. Next you want to carefully remove the pad from its rubber tray. You can do this with teasers, or some other tool or just your fingers (thin gloves would be good). Don't poke the pad because it is not really foam, it is a hard porous material. And be very cautious to not splash or deposit ink on the timing strip that stretches along the inside of the printer and goes through the print head. It is almost invisible.

After you get the pad out, wash it with tap water until no more ink comes out. Then take a cottom swab and dab up all the ink you can from the rubber tray. Next use a cottom swab saturated with Windex to clean the rubber tray. Finally, put Windex in the rubber tray, plug the printer back in and close and reopen the cover to see if the liquid gets sucked away. If it hasn't you're probably dealing with failure number 2. Repeat as necessary. Sometimes you can make progress with the pad back in the tray. Unplug the printer with the cover open and put the pad back in. You will notice that one corner of the pad has been notched at a 45 degree angle. This corner goes should be in the rear left when you put the pad back in its rubber tray. Finally, plug the printer back in an repeat the Windex test to see if it now gets sucked away. If you cannot get the liquid to get sucked away like it should, you may have problem 1 which will require taking the printer apart. Let's hope you don't have to do that.

If all this works, you can proceed to do cleaning cycles followed by nozzle checks. Sometimes it helps to put Windex on the pads when doing this. Also, remove the cartridge for the ink you are trying to unclog and put a couple drops of Windex on the screen the cartridge sits on and then replace the cartridge.

There are other problems that can create "clogged nozzles" so let us know what's going on if these ideas don't help.