Epson 9890 print head troubles

1

Hi everyone,

Our Art Department 9890 has been acting up, after 5+ years of near flawless performance. I think it helps that we’re in the deep south with high humidity.

The problems started with some stubborn clogged heads in the MK/PK channel, combined with a weird alignment issue. To make a long story short, I used a combination of the “shoe-shine” bounty towel method, a new wiper blade, and flushing the lines with piezo-flush (init. fill), and am now getting clear nozzles. However, the alignment issue persists.

I would like to attach part of a nozzle-check to show you all. The problem is very clear. Not sure how to do that on this forum…the insert image function not working.

2

crop

3

Ok. Yeah, that little bulge is a decaying print-head. The K channel is about to blow. It starts in the middle generally (right where you see this bowing).

It probably has about another month or so of printing.

Sorry for the bad news, but 5yrs is damn good for this model. Generally they live 2.5 yrs.

regards,
Walker

4

With all the other channels still good, could we go with piezography with a blown MK/PK?

5

Yeah. You would put PK in the Yellow and MK in the LLK and re-map some curves. This would work for all MK printing and you would need to hand-spray the gloss prints with something like Hahnemuhle Archival Spray to eliminate any bronzing that occurs due to the larger amount of ink lay-down of Piezography vs epson ABW.

best,
Walker