[Help Request] Epson Stylus Pro 4000 not printing with nozzle check

InkjetMall Customer Support Printer Maintenance & Cartridges
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I own a Epson Stylus Pro 4000 and 4800. That have been sitting idle for several years now and I am trying to put them back into service. I just purchase several bottles of Piezo Flush from Injetmall to be delivered to me in Ottawa Canada.

I searched the internet to find out how to try and bring these printers back to functioning properly. I was able to find an article on the internet by Sarah Fox of Fusion Graphics describing how she got her printer operating again after being unused for several years. She described a process and procedure that she followed from Arthur Entlich who hepled many owners of inkjet printers and produced cleaning manuals on the different Epson printers, to assist them with that process. He suggested using blue shop towels saturated in a cleaning solution of window cleaner with ammonia and isopropyl alcohol in a mixture of 3 to 1. Also filling the ink cartridges with the same cleaning solution and removing any dried ink in the ink lines. I followed both their instructions and filled up my OEM cartridges with the prescribed cleaning fluid recommendation of 3 parts window cleaner to one part isopropyl alcohol. I also removed the M7 nuts on the ink lines that connect to the printer head and syringed out any of the old dried ink. All the ink lines are now full of the cleaning solution with a little of the ink to make them visible. I ran several power cleaning cycles and did nozzle checks following that. At the same time I used the blue shop towels that he suggested in his manual, soaked in the cleaning fluid solution to clean the head. I also cleaned the flush box and the capping station.
After doing this procedure for several days I was able to get 7 out of 8 heads unclogged with the nozzle check showing complete full colour blocks. The magenta was completely clogged though. They say that magenta has a greater amount of pigment making it more susceptible to clogging. I am suspecting that it is the magenta damper that will most likely need to be replaced. This involves taking apart part of the head which I am a little cautious of, but I have watched several videos that have given me some relative confidence to complete the task.
The biggest issue I have now, that I have no idea of how to fix, and I am hopeful I can get some guidance or suggestions from you, is the print head is no longer putting ink on the paper when I am doing nozzle checks. It is going through the motions but no ink is getting to the paper. I can put a pad with the cleaning solution under the head and there is ink coming off the head with that procedure. Also there is ink being sent to the maintenance tank, so it seems ink is passing through the head. The cartridges are also getting lower with the cleaning cycles being done. I read on DP review that using Windex for too long on the head can remove ink from the head with the only fix being several power cleanings. I have a full set of complete ink cartridges that I have never used. I can put a little bit of your cleaning solution into each cartridge as Arthur Entlich suggested in his manual and shake them up before installing them to then run an init fill and then some power cleaning cycles to see if that will get the head printing again. The dates on the cartridges is 2006, 2007, 2008. A post on Luminous Landscape said that it wasn’t an issue to use out of date ink cartridges. I know that was not Arthur’s view or opinion, though. I had been using ink cartridges past the expiry date when I was running the printer successfully about 5 years ago. I was thinking of using the older cartridges with a small amount of either the piezo flush cleaning solution that is being shipped to me, injected into each ink cart to insure it will run through the head without clogging it, to see if I can simply get the printer working again, without investing several hundreds of dollars in ink and finding out that the head is damaged. What do you think of that approach? There was a forum post that I read with someone having a similar issue and there was a suggestion that a fuse on the main board may have been blown.

Any suggestions would be helpful to restore the printer so I can purchase some of your ink to use in it.

Regards,
Larry

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after reading this (it’s hard because one paragraph sorry), I think there was large blocks of pigment in your ink lines and dampers that got lodged during cleaning. You need to remove head and dampers, replace (or clean) all your dampers, manually purge your head backwards with our small format cleaning kit (drawing PiezoFlush from the print head nozzle plate backwards up the ink stemps), replace it all and run an initial fill to get everything working.

-Walker

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