Problems with refilling HP 27 Black

[alexandereci]

This time, I'm refilling the black #27 cart for a HP 3550 printer.

This cart has gone dry, as it went through 3-4 pages of text print with the pages emerging clean and white (does this mean absolutely NO ink was left in it?), but I was able to fill it 3 days after this happened, the cart was not taken out of the printer but kept in the printer for these 3 days. I managed to fill the cart with about 7cc of black ink before it 'bleeds' out through the nozzles. Okay, the refill instructions say I probably over-refilled it so I let it sit and drip for a while. When the drip stops, I install it in the printer, but it does not print.

What's funny is that when I wipe the printhead, the ink flows out easily. If I let it sit on a wad of tissue paper, it can and does soak the tissue if left long enough. But it still won't print when installed in the printer.

I tried making a Word document with the word 'BLACK' in Times New Roman font and 95 font size, then printed this out. Still no black print.

How come the ink can go out of the cart, but does not print? Help please!

 

[alexandereci]

BTW, I'm following instructions from this page.

 

[tigerwan]

If the cartridge was allowed to print while empty as you described, the print head would have overheated, and burned out. The ink helps cool the heat resistors in the print head. You need another cartridge.

 

[alexandereci]

It burns out that easily?

 

[tigerwan]

I am afraid so yes. They can never be allowed to print without ink flow. The heat resistors are made to print at a certain temperature, they are also made to burn out at a certain temperature.

 

[InkMon]

Bummer

 

[ghwellsjr]

My first inkjet printer was an HP that was given to me. I had such a bad experience trying to refill those cartridges with the built-in head that I finally concluded that the only advantage of that kind of printer was if you bought a new cartridge each time one ran out of ink. That way, you get a new head and it always works. All problems solved by buying lots of expensive cartridges with a tiny amount of ink and a new print head.

Well that wasn't for me. In my opinion, if you want to refill, do it on a printer that has separate cartridges for each color and a replaceable printhead. That boils down to Canon. Unfortunately, the newer chipped cartridges make that more of a hassle with any of the recent model printers but you can still buy new and used Canon printers on eBay that use the unchipped BCI-6 cartridges. Sometimes you can get a defective printer that only needs a new print head and you can get those at reasonable prices and get a good deal overall. Even if those eBay printers seem overpriced, they are still worth it if you just think how few OEM cartridges you won't have to buy to break even.

For example, a used iP4000 just sold for $103, a new iP6000D for $152, a used MP780 for $280 and a used i9900 for $331. These were all in good working order. There were others of some for less money that didn't have cartridges installed.

A set of OEM cartridges for those printers cost:
iP4000 = $62
iP6000D = $72
MP780 = $62
i9900 = $96

I do not recommend buying third-party cartridges. I recommend refilling OEM cartridges.