I can't get a good nozzle check on my new P400

Or maybe both. Time will tell. Speaking of which …

Yes, that is often the case. It takes a lot of very tedious repetition to be certain of the cause and cure. And as Keith said earlier, it’s hard to know whether the fix is just over the hill or the cause is hopeless. Such is life with refillables. Or at least it can be for a lot of people. Some get lucky. I’ve been both. Hence my lessons post.

No. You’d only perform any of the procedures in the small format cleaning kit, including the under the print-head procedure, to remove dried-on ink. This is a new printer that’s only ever had flush as I understand it, so there would be no benefit, and as Keith observed, the under the head routine is not without risk.

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Very interesting indeed. It had occurred to me that the two channels that you were having problems with were at either end of the print head, but I didn’t know what that meant.

Let me tell you a tale. At some point in the dim, dark past, I had a printer on which I was using non-IJM inks and refillable carts. Once I had achieved a good nozzle check I could print happily and the printer was well-behaved, up to the next head clean. At some stage the printer would decide it was time for one, either because an ARC chip had reset, or the printer had just decided that it was time, as all these printers do from time to time. And after the clean there were gaps all over the nozzle check that were hard to remove. It took several days of purge patterns, patience and head cleans to resolve the situation. And then all would be well until the next clean. With eight ARC chips, these cascading cleans came often. I found someone else with the same problem, with a different print and carts from a different supplier.

You can’t operate like this. You can’t continually find yourself in the situation where you need to print, and the printer decides that it’s time for a clean, and you can’t print for a couple of days.

So the question is - how can a simple head clean, which is supposed to solve problems, cause so many where there were none before the clean? It had to be that air was getting in during the clean. I felt that there was a poor seal between the ink nipple in the cartridge bay and the rubber seal in the exit port of the cartridge. Where did the fault lie? It could be either the printer or the cartridge seal. Some of these cheap Chinese cartridges are pretty cheap, and so I have no doubt that part of the blame lay there. But I also suspect that there was manufacturing variation in the print head manifold - the plastic containing the cartridge bay that sits on top of the actual print head.

In the lessons I have learned post I shared else where in this thread, lesson 7 alludes to this sad and sorry tale, although without explaining all the detail.

Hopefully the relevance of this to your situation is fairly clear. Utterly intransigent nozzle gaps in a new printer running flush have to be due to a poor seal between the ink nipple and the cartridge exit port seal. The foam core is an ingenious way of trying to ensure a good seal. Just shows that there is always something new to learn. I’d not have thought of it, as I remove my cartridge bay lids for ease of access to six of the eight carts when the printer is off.

You must be getting close to the point where you can try out ink carts.

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Are you suggesting that John do this with or without the piece of foam core? (This thread is becoming a little hard to follow the way that the post are sorted, which seems random. Replies are not displayed under the the posts that they relate to. See this post for the the foam core technique, and this post for my response.)

I came to much the same conclusion in situations where I’ve had this problem, although without the benefit of the foam core trick to confirm my diagnosis. It’s a pity, as the P400 has a lot of advantages over the P600 in terms of being easier to maintain, hibernate and swap from one inkset to another.

Success. Today I removed my flush carts and installed new carts filled with ink. I used the foam core for good luck. I did three head cleanings and then a nozzle check. The nozzle check was PERFECT.

I don’t know whether to credit the foam core, or to credit having done a better job filling the ink carts. As I posted elsewhere in this forum, I think I may have overfilled the flush carts. If overfilling can block air vents, then that was indeed the problem. I definitely did not overfill the ink carts. I filled them to just below the air vent area (the little box filled with absorbent material under the air vent hole).

In the future, when topping up an “empty” cart, how do I avoid overfilling when the ink level is no longer visible through the ink-stained plastic?

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I’m glad you’re printer did not clog. This has been my experience all told with these carts.

Yes, make sure not to overfill these carts. That’s important. Just put the cart in front of a light if you are feeling like you can’t see the level.

best,
Walker

The really interesting test to do would be to see what happens if you removed the foam core. However I’m not suggesting you do this, because one of the golden rules with anything, and printers especially, is if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. (The exception to this might be occasional cleaning of the capping station and wiper blade). When you finally get a printer working, the thing to do is … PRINT.

Although Walker vigorously defended the build and fit of these new generation cartridges, your experience and that of Christopher with using foam core does raise some questions.

I’m leaning toward the theory that one or more air inlets was clogged due to overfilling. See this discussion. If that was indeed the problem, then the filling instructions (insert 106) ought to include a warning about overfilling. The possibility of clogged air inlets brought up relatively late in the discussion. Replacing two cartridges and filling them (but not overfilling them) fixed the problem.

Can’t have helped, but if that was the main problem why did the foam core have such an impact?

I’ve worked with another user who had your symptoms both with overfilled carts (ink in the vent passage foam) and correctly filled carts. Sadly he disposed of his R2000 not long before the foam core technique came to light.

You’re right about that. Adding foam core gave me a big improvement, but I couldn’t eliminate the remaining gaps until I replaced the Y and C carts. Also, something that I mentioned in passing that the GO pattern was a mess until I replaced the Y and C carts; then GO printed a perfect checkerboard pattern.

It may be that the foam core tipped the carts forward enough to make a difference in the fluid level at the air vents. Since I always waited overnight after trying something, maybe the absorbent material had time to dry out, letting air into the vents.

I’m going to keep using the foam core. It only applies a slight downward pressure. It can’t hurt.

There’s no law of printers that says that you can’t have more than one problem.

The forum software is now warning me that I’ve posted more than 25% of the replies in this thread, so perhaps it’s time to shut up and go and do something else.