IMS Refill system -- Mixing "black" from Magenta + Cyan + Yellow

[InkyFingers]

I have been using the IMS Refill Kit for more than a year with my Lexmark X73 printer (Black 71 cartridge / Color 20 cartridge), and getting good results. I find the Black cartridge can be refilled 10+ times before it needs to be replaced.

But about 95% of my printing is just in black, because I have a home office for my work. So I find that I use up the Black, and still have tons of color inks left.

But, yesterday I tried something new: I mixed equal parts of Magenta + Cyan + Yellow to get "Black". After a number of smear tests, though, I found I had to mix 2 parts Magenta + 1 part Cyan + 1 part Yellow to get something that most closely resembes the Black in the IMS. I did notice that the viscosity of the original IMS Black seems to be a little heavier than the mixed "Black" -- not sure how this might affect printing performance from the ink jets.....

SO -- I have yet to try this mixed "Black" in my cartridge to see how it works.

Has anyone else tried this? And how did it work for you?

Thanks for your response. )

InkyFingers .....

 

[Nifty]

InkyFingers, welcome, and great name!!!

Back when I was first starting out in refilling, I use to put all my ink, black and color, that I forced from cartridges (during refilling, cleaning, etc.) into a bottle. My intention was to re-inject the mix back into a cartridge to print... I was raised with the "waste nothing" philosophy. Well, I ended up scraping the idea because I didn't want to risk any printhead problems by using bad ink.

Well, to your statement, I too have always ran into the issue of having more color than black. The first time it happened with my BJC-1000 printer I actually took one of my black cartridges and simply put blue ink into it. Seemed like a good idea at the time

Mixing inks for a specific color is pretty tricky as I discovered here: http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=16

If you are mixing dye inks to put into a dye cartridge I don't see any problems other than the possibility of a non-perfect color match. For that matter some people on here put dye inks into a pigment cartridge and that works for them.

Whatever you do, please keep us posted.