Printer Maintenance Tips / Suggestions

[Nifty]

Friends,

How about a thread regarding ideas on keeping our printers in tip top shape? Okay, here it is, and I'll start!

First off, dust is a know killer of inkjet (or any other type) printers. Where I live we get quite a bit of dust, but I print too often to keep one of those printer covers on my little workhorse. For the most part dust is heavier than air and settles of vertical surfaces. This being the case I see the top of my printer, especially where the paper is loaded, as a weak spot for dust collection. What I've done is taken a small pillow case and folded it in half a few times so it will lay right over the hole between my paper and the printer. This stops the majority of dust from getting into my printer. The only time it has been a "problem" is when the paper doesn't feed correctly and the printer rolls it forward and then back up where it rubs a bit against the pillow case. This is pretty rare.

Regarding dust... don't ever use a can of air to blow dust around in your printer. This usually pushes dust from non-damaging areas into places that will cause problems. If you must, you can get small vacuum attachments to suck the dust away.

Something else I've tried (but don't know if it helps) is to use a porous material (paper towel, q-tip, etc.) and try to wick up as much ink as possible from the pads that the printhead sits on. I'm hoping that this will stall the "waste tank full" error message indefinitely. I don't do this too often due to the difficulty of access and the lack of knowledge of how this effects the pads and printhead.

I've also just started leaving my printer on 24/7 based on comments received here: http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=141

Any other suggestions?

 

[Craig Ross]

Rob
recentlyI had a problem with my HP leaving a singular clear streak through my prints a vertical streak
opposite to the head travel, thinking it was the cart put a new one in , no go, so after some head scratching
I remembered a couple years ago I had the same problem on a Canon printer called a Hyperphoto a large
commercial roll feed inkjet printer but worked pretty much the same as most printers, the canon tech that
arrived to fix it simply wiped the encoder strip and it was fixed.This also worked on my HP .The encoder
strip which is on all brands is the plastic strip that runs through the back of the head carriage assembly and across the length of the printer it has very fine lines on it to tell the head via an optical sensor where to drop ink if it gets dirty it can skip that section. I was also told not use any solvents to clean this just distilled water .
The tech also took the head carriage off and cleaned the optical sensor with a cotton bud but I'm not sure this is something I,d do putting it back together might be a problem.But cleaning the encoder strip was easy enough.