magenta coloured sponge in grey 226 cartridge, how queer!

[Ant]

So just spent some time processing my used set of oem 226 cartridges, flushed out the gray cartridge and the sponge appears to be magenta stained...

Flushed with distilled water, is this accidental chromatography? gray isn't a primary so it has to be made up from a couple of colours eh?

The distilled water seemed to work very nicely and efficiently as it only took just under two litres to flush the whole set of six cartridges clean.

cheers Ant

 

[mikling]

That is typical of Canon grey. It has magenta constituents in it and these are very aggressive.

 

[PeterBJ]

In this post http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=62385#p62385 I wrote:

...See this scan of the underside of a windowed and an opaque cartridge with needles inserted, the lower cartridge is not magenta but a flushed and dried CLI-526 GY, click to enlarge:...

So I think mikling is right and this is typical of the Canon OEM CLI-x226 GY cartridge.

 

[The Hat]

Ant
If you look at the picture below it has a grey printed patch in it along with several others colours.

Now you might say so what, but that grey patch was produced by mixing Magenta, Cyan and Yellow ink only.

So if you wanted to make up your own grey ink you would use the very same colours
in a select quantity just the same way that Canon do.

Also grey ink can be made up in many different ways by using a variety of different colour inks
to get the correct shade that you may require..

 

[Ant]

A bit of colour theory eh? makes sense, just finished doing my first refill! not sure if it went ok though... two of the carts I top-filled sucked every drop of ink out of the reservoir so I could still see the clear prism below... I weighed them and they are the correct weight... so... I dunno really... I checked one of said carts by taking off the elastic band and the orange cap and the ink outlet port sponge was half dry then before my very eyes it started to saturate the sponge in a very slow controlled way so I replaced the orange cap and the elastic band and placed it back in the plastic box I'm keeping my carts in.

printer is canon mg6220
carts are canon cli 226
top fill "old school it ain't broke so don't fix it" method

cheers Ant

 

[The Hat]

Ant
If your cartridges dont have any ink in the reservoir and you reset the chip on them
and put them into your printer, they wont work very well at all.

The cartridge will run dry on you and youll get no warning of this penting disaster
because you have overwritten the printers fail safe system, i.e. the Prism.

There must be a small amount of ink in the reservoir first;
enough to cover the prism thats inside the cartridge,
for your printer/chip combination to work affectively together and give you an accrete ink reading.

I suggest you top them up a little before using them, fore warned is fore armed..

 

[Ant]

Cheers The Hat, so top them up beyond the weight they should be at? so the prism is definitely covered with ink?

cheers Ant

 

[Tudor]

What weight are we talking about, Ant?

 

[Ant]

What weight are we talking about, Ant?

The weight of the cartridge 20grams when full.

cheers Ant

 

[Tudor]

a cli-226 can't weight 20g and have no ink in the ink chamber. Are you sure it's not the pgi-225? It's 20g just the cartridge, without the clip, right?