Japan head (OEM). It had about 7.5 billion shots on it, so it was time. Which was why I replaced it. I wasn't shocked that it died.
The new head did not fix the problem,(that shocked me) nor did six rounds of dampers, new o-rings, new tank filters, adjusted tank height, or three different lots of ink.
As soon as I flushed the lines and put OEM in it worked like a charm.
As far as the tech support question goes. I was just looking for advice.
I can rebuild "component level" head board in an hour. I build 10k / 225lbs custom robots for toys. I can also change a print head on a printer and diagnose viscosity issues as easy as the next guy.
The reason I'm so frustrated is because the ink should have worked. However it didn't.
Another key thing to remember here is that both sides of the head went at the EXACT same time. Shortly after I put in a new bottle of ink.
The only thing going through two sets of lines, filters, dampers to the head is THE INK.
For me their performance has gone down over the last six months and really hit the floor over the last three months. By performance I'm mean clogged nozzles, intermittent cleanings during printing, etc.
I'm not looking for a flame war here or for people to judge my ability to replace parts on a simple machine. I wanted to make a potential problem aware to my fellow sign shop owners so a serious problem can be avoided.
This has practically closed my doors. I really thought it was my machine as Triangle guaranteed me it wasn't the ink. I didn't want to pay another 1600.00 out for Roland ink and have it not work, but the change did work.
The evidence is stacked pretty high against the ink at this point. I replaced the ENTIRE ink train and the only thing that resolved the problem was a different ink manufacturer. Seems pretty simple to me.
If you are using Triangle and love it than great. I've used it loyally for three years and never had a serious problem until now. Any little hiccups that occurred were happily taken care of by my rep. I prefer the Triangle color gamut, price, performance and ability to print on a wide range of materials.
I do not like how when anything goes wrong Triangle blames you for the problem and won't help you.
I'm stepping off my soap box. This is what happened to me. I wanted to share my story and speak with others who may have been affected by Triangle inks of late. I have talked to people who have had problems lately. I have also talked to people who have had no issues. This is my story. I wish I could still use Triangle ink. I love the stuff, but it's not working in my machine so I have to move on.
