hybriddesign
owner Hybrid Design
Hi, we've got a two year old JV300 running bulk 2L mimaki sublimation ink and we've got a mystery issue. The printer will not print yellow ink on either head. This sounds like a simple fix but notes on it are below.
Cause - we believe that the bulk ink bag was not seated correctly and this caused the ink line and head to run dry. I wasn't in the shop at the time and the employee who diagnosed this didn't have a lot of experience with the machine so take this with a grain of salt.
Effect - yellow ink stopped printing completely from each head. We get a few lines here and there during a test print and if we print a big swatch of yellow some ink does come out but we're probably only getting 10-15% out of any yellow ink channel at any time.
We noticed that sometimes if you visually look at the bottom of the heads you see a little bit of yellow ink in a row of dots where the yellow ink channel is.
Things we've done to try and fix it:
-Lots of head cleanings and at least 10, likely more hard ink fill ups.
-New capping stations (old stations looked fine but we changed them just in case and this was done mid way through the 10+ hard fill ups)
-We checked the ink delivery and everything seems fine (solenoid is working, the ink bag located below the bulk ink pack is full).
-We swapped damper positions and yellow prints just fine out of another head channel (for instance we switched cyan and yellow and now cyan doesn't print and yellow prints fine out of the original cyan channel.
-We very very very gently ran cleaning solution through the head by pushing an ink hose over the head manifold nipple and pushing ink through with a syringe. The ink went through fine (if this were a dx4 head we would have looked for a clean spray pattern but we were too scared to push hard with this being a dx5 so the cleaning solution just kind of dribbled out the bottom as we pushed it through slowly) but this didn't seem to fix anything.
Things we haven't done:
-The dampers were not replaced. It was tempting to replace them but considering that but after swapping the damper positions and that not affecting anything damper issues were more or less ruled out.
-Head manifold replacement. I don't know much about the manifolds on these heads but on our Rolands we'd often have cracked manifold nipples which caused the same thing. Unless all 4 nipples cracked at the same time we don't think it's a cracked manifold issue so we ruled that out.
-Electrical, the yellow does kind of fire little bit out sometimes so we don't think it's electrical but if there's something I'm missing I'd love to hear it.
We're not sure what to do at this point. We were going to try and clamp all the ink lines but the yellow, clamping them right above the dampers and run an ink fill up that way to try and prime the head but that's pretty much the last thing we can think of doing.
If anyone has any ideas we'd would love to hear them. We have a great tech guy but with our location he's in another state and even if we flew him out here we and he isn't really sure what the issue is and we're hoping not to replace two $3k heads for an issue that might not even be a head issue...
Cause - we believe that the bulk ink bag was not seated correctly and this caused the ink line and head to run dry. I wasn't in the shop at the time and the employee who diagnosed this didn't have a lot of experience with the machine so take this with a grain of salt.
Effect - yellow ink stopped printing completely from each head. We get a few lines here and there during a test print and if we print a big swatch of yellow some ink does come out but we're probably only getting 10-15% out of any yellow ink channel at any time.
We noticed that sometimes if you visually look at the bottom of the heads you see a little bit of yellow ink in a row of dots where the yellow ink channel is.
Things we've done to try and fix it:
-Lots of head cleanings and at least 10, likely more hard ink fill ups.
-New capping stations (old stations looked fine but we changed them just in case and this was done mid way through the 10+ hard fill ups)
-We checked the ink delivery and everything seems fine (solenoid is working, the ink bag located below the bulk ink pack is full).
-We swapped damper positions and yellow prints just fine out of another head channel (for instance we switched cyan and yellow and now cyan doesn't print and yellow prints fine out of the original cyan channel.
-We very very very gently ran cleaning solution through the head by pushing an ink hose over the head manifold nipple and pushing ink through with a syringe. The ink went through fine (if this were a dx4 head we would have looked for a clean spray pattern but we were too scared to push hard with this being a dx5 so the cleaning solution just kind of dribbled out the bottom as we pushed it through slowly) but this didn't seem to fix anything.
Things we haven't done:
-The dampers were not replaced. It was tempting to replace them but considering that but after swapping the damper positions and that not affecting anything damper issues were more or less ruled out.
-Head manifold replacement. I don't know much about the manifolds on these heads but on our Rolands we'd often have cracked manifold nipples which caused the same thing. Unless all 4 nipples cracked at the same time we don't think it's a cracked manifold issue so we ruled that out.
-Electrical, the yellow does kind of fire little bit out sometimes so we don't think it's electrical but if there's something I'm missing I'd love to hear it.
We're not sure what to do at this point. We were going to try and clamp all the ink lines but the yellow, clamping them right above the dampers and run an ink fill up that way to try and prime the head but that's pretty much the last thing we can think of doing.
If anyone has any ideas we'd would love to hear them. We have a great tech guy but with our location he's in another state and even if we flew him out here we and he isn't really sure what the issue is and we're hoping not to replace two $3k heads for an issue that might not even be a head issue...