SightLine
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It really pains me to even post this as I'm generally not one to post something like this but I've hit the end of the line.
Since around August of last year Triangle has had a long run of 440ml cartridges which have defects that cause the empty flag to fail to come out. This is the plastic tab the pops out the near the bottom of the cartridges which triggers you printer to STOP printing. Contrary to what you might think - (at least on a Mimaki JV33) the chip on cartrdige will actually work indefinitley once it runs down to 1. It will never stop working as long as the empty flag on the cartridge pops out at which point the printer will write to the chip that it is empty and stop printing.
This has now happend to us over a dozen times. The first few times I figured it was a fluke and went on with life. Finally back in December I sent a message to Triangle from their website. A few days later I get an email apologizing for the problems and asking if I'd kindly ship them any of the defective cartrdiges we had not already tossed - he even gave Triangles FedEx # to ship them on their dime so they coudl inspect the cartridges and try to find the source of the problem. Fast forward to mid February - I've had it happen a couple more times so I email the guy at Triangle and took a guess at the CEO's email and CC'd him as well. That did get a quick response as well as a couple of phone calls from another tech at Triangle. He said they were aware of the issue and have taken action to make sure the problem is corrected. He assured me the current ink stock at Fellers is the new problem corrected cartridges and said he would ship me a set of ink at no charge for the problems but it would take a week.
I needed ink - so taking their word called Fellers and ordered a few that I needed to get us by till the other came in. So here I am today - tight deadline job due tomorrow morning, printing about 110 feet of 54" vinyl at high resolution that has to be cut into about 600 peices. All day non stop print job - printer has 4 full backup cartridges and the other 4 are about a quarter full or so. We have been busy on other projects so the printer has been printing pretty much unattended the entire day - nothing unusual. My employee comes up near the end of the day - says the prints look odd....
2 cartridges - Cyan and Black are BONE DRY! Empty flags did not pop out so our trusty Mimaki thinks it still has ink and happily keep on chugging away just dry firing on 4 ink channels. I'm sure this is good for the printhead.
Anyways - if you are using Triangle - be very alert if you think a cartrdige might be low. It might actually be sucked totally dry and never let your machine know.
Happy fun pictures of empty cartridges with no empty flags out and 80ish feet of wasted material, yellow and magenta ink, an entire days production and where I now have to pay an employee overtime to now spend the night here so we can meet the deadline on this job.
Since around August of last year Triangle has had a long run of 440ml cartridges which have defects that cause the empty flag to fail to come out. This is the plastic tab the pops out the near the bottom of the cartridges which triggers you printer to STOP printing. Contrary to what you might think - (at least on a Mimaki JV33) the chip on cartrdige will actually work indefinitley once it runs down to 1. It will never stop working as long as the empty flag on the cartridge pops out at which point the printer will write to the chip that it is empty and stop printing.
This has now happend to us over a dozen times. The first few times I figured it was a fluke and went on with life. Finally back in December I sent a message to Triangle from their website. A few days later I get an email apologizing for the problems and asking if I'd kindly ship them any of the defective cartrdiges we had not already tossed - he even gave Triangles FedEx # to ship them on their dime so they coudl inspect the cartridges and try to find the source of the problem. Fast forward to mid February - I've had it happen a couple more times so I email the guy at Triangle and took a guess at the CEO's email and CC'd him as well. That did get a quick response as well as a couple of phone calls from another tech at Triangle. He said they were aware of the issue and have taken action to make sure the problem is corrected. He assured me the current ink stock at Fellers is the new problem corrected cartridges and said he would ship me a set of ink at no charge for the problems but it would take a week.
I needed ink - so taking their word called Fellers and ordered a few that I needed to get us by till the other came in. So here I am today - tight deadline job due tomorrow morning, printing about 110 feet of 54" vinyl at high resolution that has to be cut into about 600 peices. All day non stop print job - printer has 4 full backup cartridges and the other 4 are about a quarter full or so. We have been busy on other projects so the printer has been printing pretty much unattended the entire day - nothing unusual. My employee comes up near the end of the day - says the prints look odd....
2 cartridges - Cyan and Black are BONE DRY! Empty flags did not pop out so our trusty Mimaki thinks it still has ink and happily keep on chugging away just dry firing on 4 ink channels. I'm sure this is good for the printhead.
Anyways - if you are using Triangle - be very alert if you think a cartrdige might be low. It might actually be sucked totally dry and never let your machine know.
Happy fun pictures of empty cartridges with no empty flags out and 80ish feet of wasted material, yellow and magenta ink, an entire days production and where I now have to pay an employee overtime to now spend the night here so we can meet the deadline on this job.
