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Metallic ink - fill cartridge with ??? To save £££

Ben Kinsella

New Member
Hi I've been searching for hours to find some topics I've read a while back but can't find them...

I have a Roland vs640 and I've gone through 5 metallic cartridges now without even doing 1 job for metallic (depleted by cleaning) I've read you can fill an empty cartridge with something and have it use that instead? Saving £££

I thinks it's head cleaner but is anyone 100%

Pretty urgent as the current cartridge is nearly out.

Regards.
 

AKwrapguy

New Member
I would fill it with more metallic ink. We had the same issue. My boss wanted the awesome metallic inks so that we could do awesome metallic graphics.... but there was no demand for it and eventually the cleaning cycle just wound up eating it up.

Depending on your printer you might be able to flush the lines/head or replace them and use a different ink. You could look at some sort of flush cartridge but I have no idea what that would do to your warranty if you still have one.

The selling of metallic ink has got to be one of the greatest things Roland has done, almost the equivalent to micro translations...
 

Solventinkjet

DIY Printer Fixing Guide
Every single customer that comes to me wanting to print with metallic or white inks on a solvent printer I tell them you don't want to do it and most of the time they are convinced. Every once in a while we get a customer who says they must have it. As soon as the machine is installed we have an office bet on how soon they will call asking to convert to CMYKx2. Not one machine we have setup with metallic has stayed that way for more then 2 years.

Anyway, technically you could run a cleaning cartridge in place of the metallic ink. The easiest way would be to get a permanent metalic ink chip and install it on a cleaning cartridge. I would only use OEM cleaner which is more expensive but you can sleep at night knowing it was meant to be run though the machine.

Disclaimer: First, Roland does not recommend this setup so if you have any type of warranty on the machine or heads, make sure you are willing to lose that. Second, every time you want to use the metallic you will have to either manually refill the lines, which takes a good amount of time and can be messy. Or you will have to have the machine refill the line in which case you will waste a good amount of ink. So if you still save money after that, it's still a good idea. Third, there is some evidence, but it is not conclusive, that running cleaning solution through the head instead of ink can wear it out faster. I don't know if there is any truth to that but I can see running a much less viscous solution through could affect the head in some way over the long term.

At the end of the day I would recommend converting to CMYKx2 instead if you want to really save time and money. Then just print on metallic vinyl when you need the effect or outsource it.
 

SignMeUpGraphics

Super Active Member
You can install an EcoSol MAX 2 cleaning cartridge (ESL4-CL), The printer won't complain, and it will keep the nozzles clean (and eventually flush out all of the lines).
You could technically re-install metallic down the track, but you'd need to do a lot of heavy cleans to push out the cleaning fluid.
This is the best/cheapest/easiest option to preserve your head and not waste any more metallic ink. We replaced our MT and WH with cleaning carts and even after a year they were still registering as full.
 
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