Need Help Mimaki JV3 160SP dumping cyan like booze at an open bar wedding!

[Tom S]

Hi again folks.
I'm tinkering with a jv3 160sp and got the electronics sorted out and was on my way to getting the heads unclogged and all of a sudden during a pattern test it starts dumping out the cyan like mad, from the moment it leaves the capping station till it returns to park its a steady blue band. It also stopped shooting any other colours now as well. (on the plus side it looks like it cleared all the cyan nozzles in the process)
Anyone ever see something like that?

Tom.

 

[Tom S]

Ok this is really odd. I even swapped both cables with the magenta head and it still prints only cyan..
FML

Tom.

 

[GTSTech_1]

I'm afraid you haven't solved your electrical problem just yet. That output is being caused by either Head cable not seated fully at the printhead or where the head cable connects to the slider board, or the Slider board itself has gone bad.

Just my .02

 

[Tom S]

I pulled the slider board off and went through all the cables and made sure the connections are clean and well seated, so far no sign of anything that could cause this. Slider board physically looks good, its clean no hot spots. Fets on it tested out good. I'm about to put the slider board back on, not feeling too hopeful.
If I can remember correctly it started right after a strong clean cycle.
Whats got me mostly stumped is even when attached to the magenta port, the cyan is the only head laying ink down.
I hope its not a head gone bad.

Now we did have a power blink this morning and It might have started acting up right after that. What are the chances its a corrupt firmware?

Thanks again.

 

[jfiscus]

Tom, if you're wanting to get this thing running and need parts a good friend of mine has a couple parts machines I'm sure he'd sell parts off of for a good price. Shoot me a pm.
I can't help you much more with this issue but it does look like a slider/ribbon issue to me. Check all your ribbon cables and and re-seat them.

 

[Tom S]

Thank you I will pm you shortly.
But in the meantime, Progress!
So I checked the transistors on the mainboard, all good.
Checked the ribbon cable ends from the main to the slider, all good. I still might do a continuity test on all of them yet.
Checked the ribbons for all 4 heads, all good.
Did some comparative probing on the heads.. Bingo. Cyan head has an internal open circuit in parallel with the power decoupling caps so its toast.. what a shame too as all nozzles were pretty clear flowing. lol
Grabbed a spare head that is questionable for clogs but electrically sound and installed it.
No more cyan band!
It looked like the magenta and cyan and at least one of the yellows drained back to the carts as i'm having a hard time getting them to print anything yet save for some very faint yellow.
Black has about 4 or 5 nozzles plugged but I can work on flushing those once I get the others going. Fingers are crossed that its just an ink flow issue and not electrical still.
I'm sure i'll have more questions soon.
Thanks all.
Tom.

 

[Tom S]

One step forward 4 steps back.
Black is for the most part working, magenta, cyan are toast and yellow is likely most of the way to toast as well.
the sad part is I have a few heads leftover from scrapping the 540 and they all have the nozzle plate separated from the head body and bypassing ink and leaking like a sieve.
I put 2 heads in the cyan position just to try get through testing the black and yellow and every time i make a yellow pass it suddenly says the cyan head, either the left or right, is bad (error 7) what are the chances the heads just out of the blue die like that?
First head the left row died, so I put another in and the right row then died after a yellow pattern test...
this machine is going to be the death of me.
Anyone have some electrically sound but plugged dx4 heads?

 

[Tom S]

Progress!
I was able to round up some electrically sound but trashed face heads and was able to run the printer. all the channels appear functional and if i move the 1 working head i have around I get ink from all lines.
DX4 heads new are not exactly in the budget any time soon so now I need to round up some working used heads.

 

[MikePro]

keep the printheads where they are, isolate where the issue comes from by swapping ribbon cables to see if the issue follows. if the issue stays with the printhead, then its the head. if the band continues through another channel then you know the issue is above the printhead (creased ribbon cable, connection to slider board, or encoder issues)

edited after noticing you installed old printheads & the blue band disappeared after doing-so: chances are that you have some ink that dripped down the ribbon cable and into the connection. you can clean this by wetting some index card stock with cleaning solution and inserting/removing clean pieces a few times, and then finish by repeating a few times with dry card stock to remove any remaining moisture.

 

[Tom S]

I had some heads that were totally dead and stopping the machine from even going through the printing motions after the cyan died so i needed to be sure it didnt fry the main board.
once I did that i wanted to be sure the lines were not dried up so i flushed the one working head a bit and flipped it from channel to channel. All channels and ink lines are working well so its strictly a head issue.

I did clean and freshen up the leading edge of all the cables and cleaned the sockets before posting here, no change in operation. I did more searching and found a forum post that showed the same issue and it was determined the head was bad so i just trashed it.

Tom.