Auto Nozzle check and clean

[Jeffg53]

The orphan R2000 doesn’t seem to qualify for its own heading so I’m posting here. I saw a FB post by Walker which says that an auto nozzle check and clean should be run every day. I tried it on my 2000 with a P2 inkset in IJM carts. It fails and gives a message that it couldn’t clean the head and suggest a manual clean. In true Epson fashion, it doesn’t say which head, nor does the pattern tell me either. I then did a manual head clean, and ran the auto again. It still fails.

I’m wondering whether this only works on Epson carts. Looking at the pattern, it all looks good, and a purge pattern shows no banding. I also ran it on a 3880 with Epson inks, and it worked.

Before I start doing anything serious, can you please advise whether this should work with IJM carts? It’s not advice that I have ever seen here.

[walkerblackwell]

FB post was a general and geared towards less-consumer-level printers (4900s and up). Auto-cleanings should be done before a printer has crapped out fyi and a MAINTENANCE procedure not a fixer.

If it’s failing, do a manual nozzle check and see if it’s just the ink sensor.

[walkerblackwell]

It’s not the carts unless the carts haven’t been properly handled (ie: air plugs, empty carts, etc etc). We use these carts for R&D testing and the never give us issues. I’ve used over 200 carts in the last few months without issue.

best,
W

[Jeffg53]

Thanks Walker. Everything looks fine. I just thought that I would try it out on the R2000. I was looking at it as a maintenance procedure. I was surprised when it failed and was simply looking for an answer.

[Brian_S]

I strongly suspect that the answer is that an auto nozzle check won’t work for a printer with piezo inks. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these on a colour printer, but (on a desktop printer) my recollection is that for each ink channel, a small checker-board pattern is printed out, so that for an eight channel printer, a matrix of eight small checker-board patterns is printed. The printer reads this pattern, and if there’s any gaps then a head clean is performed, and the pattern is reprinted and re-read. If there’s still any gaps then a stronger head clean is performed, and so the cycle continues for a maximum of four iterations or until there are no gaps - whichever happens first.

On an R2000, shade 5 is in the Cyan channel, shade 6 is in Magenta, and for those running K7 rather than P2, shade 7 is in the Yellow. I strongly suspect that those shades are too light in an auto nozzle check pattern to be correctly detected by the printer, hence the fail for Jeff’s printer when in fact there weren’t any gaps.

I have no experience with an auto-nozzle check in a large format printer, but I assumed that it was similar.

I can’t see that an auto-nozzle check does anything that I couldn’t do manually, with more control over the process. Not all nozzle gaps are clogs - some are air in the system - and my experience with a problematic desktop printer with air some years ago was that the auto check made matters worse rather than better. I’d rather have the option to wait and perhaps print purge patterns between nozzle checks and head cleans. With air in a desktop, patience is often the key, and an auto check is the exact opposite.

[LarryB]

ln fact, IJM knows the answer here (about 1/5 the way down):

Print Head Cleaning Tips

Larry

[Brian_S]

Thanks Larry. I knew that I had read that somewhere, but last night I couldn’t find it.

[Jeffg53]

Another day, another load of ink in the not to be mentioned waste bucket.