Hi All,
Have taken the next step and am trying white ink. Cleaned lines 5 thru 8 with cleaning fluid and installed white cartridges new. Used syringe to bring ink through dampers. Can't get ink to come out of printhead. No problem with CMYK. Tried printing white image through EKStudio with no luck, purged lines 5 thru 8 with no luck. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Mark, Can you see white when you do a nozzle check on the platten? Did you see it whene you drew with the syringe? Were you doing double CMYK before this? If you can see good white on the nozzle pattern, you may not have pretreated correctly.
White ink, the curse of dtg printing! White clogs the lines, needs to be shaken almost daily. If you don't print at least 6 a day, it's going to clog the arteries and cause a dtg heart attack. There needs to be a coagulate added in manufacturing of this blasted ink.
clog ordered new printhead $$$ cant even get cleaning fluid to print. cmyk side fine, did line charges print clean 4 cartridges used up $$$ this system only has 200 shirts on it.
print purge looks like race stripes, installed new dampers, I was told foam is in the head let it sit for 24 hours, same problem. ?
ok im back up and running
seems I just need ink to get the printhead to fire
so if you add a new head its not going to fire with just cleaning fluid you will need to add some ink.
Does anyone see a problem with putting a clean damper on the head and lightly pushing cleaning fluid through to loosen a clog? This would avoid having to "clean" out the whole tube. I could monitor which nozzles are open by watching the bottom of the head while pushing ink through the damper.
The main reason for using a damper is because I know my syringe will fit on it. I guess you could do this without using the damper, but I don't know if I would get a good seal.
Sean,
Instead of pushing it through and risking a leak(or spray) in the carrage area, you could connect tubes to the dampers, and draw cleaning liquid through the tubes in the bottom of the capping station. This would also moderate the amount of presure being exerted on the parts inside the head.
Ian
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I have done that before, but I didn't want to lose the ink in the tubes, so I went ahead and carefully tried it.
I used a clean damper, and lightly pushed distilled water through the head. At first only a few nozzles allowed water to pass, but after allowing the pressure (gently) to work, I was able to see tiny droplets coming out of each nozzle. I then put the dampers (with ink) back on, ran a couple of cleanings and this seemed to work. I'm wondering if my dampers are getting old, since I get good flow when I pull ink with my syringe. I've just gone over a year with these dampers.
with all the clogging I think print head before damper
also watch out for that carriage as static has got me more than once and chip holder is the victim
I'm getting better results today. I've never had a problem quite this bad, but flushing the head with distilled water directly at the head did work, and if I had cleaning fluid I would have used that.
I would be happy to walk anyone through that since I'm SURE Anajet wouldn't recommend.
Sean, Another thing I would check and keep an eye on, is make sure the capping station is totally clear. When doing your weekly maintenance(cleaning cap station), put cleaning fluid, hot water or choice of solvent in the white side. Draw this out with a syringe through the bottom tubing(waste area). with the head NOT engaged, you can put as much suction on this as needed, but it should flow well. If it seems a little blocked, you can disconect the black hoses that run into the cam motor and clean away blockage from the very tiny holes. While this is disconnected, check the clear tubes, they should really flow, if not you have gelled white ink in the cam area. If you do this regularly, you should get a good couple of years out of the capping station, but if it's clogged, you will not get proper suction durring head cleans and ink charges... and it's time for a new capping station. It's a little involved, but you can change this yourself. In my oppinion, this little maintenance tip will prevent future head clogs and will prolong head life. I would say half the head replacements I see in these forums are mis-diagnosed and could be prevented buy undersataning how these things work and doing what I discribe above.
Ian
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About a month ago I did have a nice size chunk of white ink in the black tubes going into the pumping station. I removed that, but will definitely do what you have suggested.
No White Ink coming out 
