Printhead issue

[nix243]

I am pleading for help. I have a Roland SP300V. Bought the machine new about 5 years ago, and had ink drop out issues with it almost immediately. But I had just dealt with it and started using it mainly as a cutter. Well lately I decided I wanted to get it printing again. I had a local tech come in. He did a general cleaning. Replaced the captops, and one damper. He was able to pull ink with a syringe, but still no ink output. I have been working really hard soaking the heads in the capping station, as well as doing the coffee filter trick. After about a week I was able to get C, M,and K to come back. Tried to do more soaks to get the yellow back to no avail. So I did some reading on here, and decided to try swapping the ribbon cables for the yellow and magenta. Still no good, and now I have actually lost the magenta channel, so I have taken a step back. I did shut down the soft power, then the main power, and hit the power button several times before I did anything. I am a newbie with this machine, but I do work on computers for a living. Can anyone help??

 

[artbot]

not sure how your head/colors are laid out. if you do a data swap correctly, the printer is oblivious that it's data has been sent to alternative heads. if you do it wrong you can send the data in a loop and short out the carriage or main board. on your printer what is the head/color layout such as KMCY, MCYK.... that's a two headed printer, right?

 

[nix243]

I am glad that you have replied. I read a lot of your posts. Lots of info. It is a 2 head machine. And the channel layout is K-C-M-Y.

 

[artbot]

for your printer, KC goes to MY, MY goes to KC. keeping the ribbon top/bottom exactly the same. swapping M to Y, Y to M is not a data swap. the idea is that it's like with someone crosses their legs. your entire left head's data goes to the right, and vice versa.

if you want to see if the magenta channel of the head is bad or the magenta port on your carriage board or main board is bad, you can do that by doing a proper data swap. but, this is getting a little sticky. data swaps (i did one wrong the first time i tried it) can easily be mixed up.

if the magenta head is bad it will not print with good K data going to it. if the magenta carriage board port is bad the K head will not print because of bad M data going to it.

i'm heading out for a birthday dinner (yay...) 44 years old. i'll check this thread later tonight. please don't do anything to the printer unless you are 100% sure you understand the data swap. there is a rendering of a 160sp data swap that i drew up a few places in threads on this board. i'd search for that just to get some eyeballs on the scheme of things.

 

[nix243]

Enjoy, and happy birthday. I am thinking that something went wrong when I swapped cables, now that I lost magenta and still have no yellow. I was getting full magenta before I swapped the cables around.