I have been having some serious troubles with my yellow ink, and I have now spent over 30 hours trying to fix it. I don't know if anybody caught some of my other recent posts, but I have been speaking (ironically) about being prepared for MURPHEY'S LAW, or you won't be able to make it long-term in the business world. Well, looks like I should be heeding my own advice, by keeping extra print heads or SOMETHING around..... I got back from Vegas late Wednesday (helping my cousin move back to California... no more free place to stay, right off the Strip
), and I had a bunch of rush orders to get done as soon as I was home. Therefore, I fired up the machine on Thursday, and decided to make a little money!
Well, as it turns out, the machine had other plans. Instead of printing, the yellow ink just started acting stupid, printing completely inconsistent nozzle patters, and sometimes disappearing entirely. Below, you will see plenty of nozzle tests we had done, trying to find out what the problem was:
Sometimes the yellow is present, other times it disappears entirely:
Of course, I am aware of what could be causing this: air bubbles in the lines, perhaps? I am more than willing to entertain this idea, especially considering the fact that we had recently transferred ink from near-empty carts, to carts we had been refilling. Therefore, it is possible that we actually introduced air into the lines, which is causing problems... However, I have some issues with this. First of all, we took great precautions when transferring the ink, using the same technique that doctors use to eliminate air bubbles from injection needles. Second, we had refilled ALL the ink cartridges, about a month ago; this was the one and only time we have tried this, and we posted about it on the forum (
34-76 cc's of ink left in each Brother cartridge, when empty!). We have had no signs of trouble, no signs of weakening ink, no visual air bubbles in the line, etc.... It seems strange to me that it would start now, and only in 1 color.
In case the ink was the problem, I called Raul (from Stitch City) to see about getting a new yellow ink cartridge, hoping that I could use the fresh new ink to purge out the old ink, until there was no possibility of air bubbles in the line (since I am being told that is "most likely" the problem.....). He didn't have the old cartridges on him, but he did have one of the new 500cc carts, which I decided to pick up (you can never have too much ink, right?).
Here are the 2 ink cartridges side by side:
And here is what the cartridge looks like in the machine:
I ran an absolutely ridiculous number of POWERFUL and INITIAL head cleanings, and have seen no improvement.... So at the moment, I'm back to having no way to print (I cannot believe this is happening, again); but, I have this awesomely large ink cartridge, and my pocketbook is $350 lighter (much of which has now been flushed down the drain, trying to fix the head)........
After flushing 1/4 of my ink down the drain, I decided to ease up on the cleaning cycles, since they had no predictable effect on the print heads. Sometimes, they would make it worse, sometimes they would make it better, and sometimes they just seemed to mock me... During the entire procedure, I stumbled on another test pattern you can print (normal), as oppose to the nozzle check. Upon printing, I discovered that, in spite of some missing nozzles, there were still solid areas of yellow, coming out great in this new test pattern! (sorry, we print a lot of image directly over other images for testing and such).
In order to test how well the yellow was working, I made an image in Photoshop that consisted of 2 long, yellow rectangles (solid). As they started printing, I was thrilled to see how good the yellow was coming out! However, as it got lower and lower in the image, I could clearly see that the ink was on its way out:
Because of this phenomenon, I have a hard time believing that air bubbles are the cause, although I am not enough of an expert to rule anything out! These are complicated machines, where almost anything can go wrong at any time...
After speaking with Raul again, this morning, and going through other possibilities, he is now under the impression that, for whatever reason, air is somehow being introduced into the system through somewhere (ie, more like a leak than air bubbles trapped in the lines). This is an entirely plausible situation, consisdering the symptoms. The good news: if that is the case, then the print head is not the problem! The bad news: I just lost this entire weekend of printing, and now have to refund several clients for rush orders that did not get done, and several more that are most likely not going to get done. The net loss to my business is going to easily exceed what I would have spent on a new print head, and I still can't print....
I am shocked that it would be having this issue, considering I was out of town for a few days and NOBODY had touched my machine while I was gone (hence the busy weekend of printing I was supposed to have ahead of me...) Although Raul has been helpful in offering suggestions over the phone, and seems to know an aweful lot about the technical side of this business, I am dead in the water until something gets figured out.... If anybody has experienced anything like this before, I am open to any suggestions you might have!
Again, thanks to Raul, and the guys at Stitch City for helping me out; I was really pleased to get an early call from Raul, following up on my situation. Hopefully, we can solve this problem, and educate other machine owners on yet one more possible issue that they should be on the lookout for!
HELP! Random clogging in the yellow print head... 
The Brother wipe method cleaning did not do anything - you gotta scrub dude!!
