Mimaki CJV150-75 Missing Nozzles and printing fuzzy with overspray

[CJV150-NB]

Hello,

I'm fairly new to wide format printing. I purchased a Mimaki CJV150-75 in '22 to be able to print marketing materials in-house (stickers, banners, posters, etc). I don't print every day, but I do at a minimum run test prints everyday to make sure everything is in working order. About a month ago we had a weird power issue where our utility was sending high and low voltage into our building because of a transformer failure. One side of the panel was only getting 41V and the other was 120V. During this period the printer was only on the auto cleaning cycle for a half the day before we figured out the voltage coming into our building was messed up. Our printer has always been connected with a surge protector. Since this day I haven't been able to get the printer back to working order. I've run over-night nozzle washes and recovered most nozzles but it has reached a point where no matter what I do nothing improves. This is what the test prints look like:

I've tried printing some solid CMYK blocks to see if the nozzles would clear up, but the results were fuzzy colors with a bunch of what looks like overspray.

The service tech I've worked with says the printer needs a board replaced, or the head is bad. Are there any more things I can try before jumping in and spending $4-5K to get the machine running again? The capping station is clean. I can see waste ink being pulled through the lines during cleaning cycles. I'd like to do as much of the trouble shooting my self to keep the service call time down if I need to go that route. Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Smoke_Jaguar]

Check your capping station alignment. There is a plastic bump block that the head carriage rests against that can be adjusted with 2 Phillips screws. With the printer in station maintenance mode it should slide freely so you can look between the gap to see if cap is centered on the Printhead.

 

[Solventinkjet]

Check the bottom of your head. The way the nozzles are deformed on your nozzle check indicate a head strike/physical damage to me.

 

[CJV150-NB]

Check your capping station alignment. There is a plastic bump block that the head carriage rests against that can be adjusted with 2 Phillips screws. With the printer in station maintenance mode it should slide freely so you can look between the gap to see if cap is centered on the Printhead.

Thanks for the advise. I'm assuming this is the plastic bump block that you are referring to? The capping station and head look to be lined up right in the middle. Just to see if it made a difference I shifted the block so the magenta side of the capping station would be covered a bit more.

I ran an ultra clean and a nozzle wash for 30 min and got some minor changes. I was able to get another line of Cyan to print and it looks like the magenta area nozzles that were really messy have aligned a little bit better.

Solventinkjet There haven't been any head strikes in the period between when the printer was working great and the power issue. I'm doing another nozzle wash for 99 min, and after that I'll check the head to see if there are any signs of damage. I cleaned around the head last week and it just looked like a clean mirror. If there is damage to the head what would it look like?

 

[Smoke_Jaguar]

Drip some cleaning fluid into the cap to see if it is draining well. Plugged pump/cap can also make cleaning ineffective.

 

[Ogre]

Definitely not the motherboard.
Test to see if the capping sealing is good and the vacuum doesn't pull air. Replace the capping with a good quality one, test the vacuum then run a normal clean. If all good then do a nozzles wash for 15 minutes then run a new clean to see if there is any improvement. Repeat the washing and cleaning if necessary.
I saw this fault so many times and always it was the capping sealing. Replacing the capping is the cheapest solution that you can try before replacing something much more expensive.