clogged....

[tattoo.dan]

Any ideas? I have ran 5 99 min nozzle washes in the last 24 hours and can't get any better than this. Did a strong clean too....any tips will be greatly appreciated as this is my first go with solvent printers.

It's a mimaki jv3-75 spII...

Thanks

i can't post an attachment so.... on a test draw the last half of my black is missing, magenta is great, cyan is missing about half an inch straight across the middle and yellow is missing even a little more. any advice on anything else i can try? my colors are not printing true like this...thanks

 

[Craig Sjoquist]

Welcome to a outstanding forum and people.

introduce yourself a bit, like experience and what ya like maybe ?

 

[artbot]

first off, solvent printers are a huge head ache. if you are used to water based, be prepared for this machine to drive you nuts with drying out and clogging. just pulling the carraige off to the side for more than 30 seconds will sound an alarm. yay! also, there's the daily cleaning cycles and pump cycles and the cleaning station off to the left to clean around the heads. if you aren't printing all the time (i only print about once a week) it's a head ache.

did you just get the printer and it was printing fine? or did it come out of mothballs to be revived? as far as basic cleaning, if it doesn't come clean with nozzle washes in about 10 minutes, i like to just go straight to a head soak. you'll have to clamp off the pump tubes (there's also a way to shut down the machine whilst the pump is compressed on the pump hoses, don't know that one yet) by opening the back panel. fill the caps with solution and let them sit. keep an eye on them because it's likely your caps/tubes will be leaking and empty. just do this procedure for about 3 hours and run some minimum cleans to reloosen ink. one thing, if you are missing large swatches of color on your heads, this can also point to vacuum or supply issues. like a vacant halo of ink in the middle of a test pattern is almost always clogged head adapters, constant top or bottom missing is capping station not sitting well north to south thus not vacuuming ink into the heads. also, you may have a clogged pump if the machine hasn't been well maintained in the past. while you have that panel off separate those tubes at the stainless steel unions and pull a vacuum going down to the pump (check to see if you have good air flow, and if not force some solution into them). then with the carriage parked, pull ink from the heads through the capping station tubes. if you see little bubbles mixing with the ink, your caps are getting iffy. that's enough to keep a guy busy for an hour or so. keep in touch after doing these things.

 

[tattoo.dan]

@ craig - sorry, i didn't realize this was my first post on this forum. u are right, it is a wealth of knowledge for the searching. i have gained a lot by searching....needed more help this time...

if there is an introduction thread i will post more in there.

@ artbot - thank you for the advice. in my searches i came across a lot of good info from you, so i honestley posted hoping you may have some advice on this for me...i will try what you suggested when i get to shop tomorrow.

history on printer is it came with the purchase of a company going under last october...bad environment (almost freezing cold in winter, can only imagine summer) i'm sure it wasn't cleaned as it should have been. i think previous owner rigged it so it wouldn't do the periodic squirt of ink since he didn't have the money to "waste" the ink. it was left plugged in and did the sleep clean though.(minus the squirt)

i have used it a few times a week since then. results are good when i'm not trying to print a picture or anything. shades are off on colors or wrong color all together...thanks

 

[artbot]

i'm a newbie to solvent as of just the last three or four months. but i've been working with wide format for my art for over ten years. so don't give me too much credit. if you just installed a used printer (which i just did as well), i'd suggest getting an entire closet of cheap parts so that when this thing starts to do it's "coming back from the dead hiccups", you'll be prepared. get a cheap local supplier like solventinksonline or do the chinese thing (i've used ebon) and get pumps, dampers, wipers, syringes, tubing, data ribbons, caps, get a bunch of stuff. so when it hits the fan, you'll just grab a part. instead of having one thing after another overnighted.

right now i completely replumbing my jv3 160sp so that i can hook cleaning solution at a bypass near the dampers. because i threw away about $400 worth of ink during my first few weeks.

 

[bmw_ante]

We have the exact same machine


I think that your capping station is in poor condition or your pumps,

You can open the cover in the back of the machine and take apart the hoses on top of the pumps, one at a time and suck ink through it, (Not so you suck through the pump , you have to suck in the hose before the pump)

so you will suck ink trough the head and down the hoses, This usually clears all the clog problems but this will not work good if your capping station is sealing bad , then you mostly will suck air

 

[artbot]

in the future, do this kind of mod to the pump lines too. you can just run to the back. twist a knob and do a head soak. or pull a top tee off shoot and pull ink etc. and you have the advantage of getting visual clues if you think you might be having vacuum/pump issue when the printer is running cycles.

 

[tattoo.dan]

I finally have a chance to take it apart and check it out today. i put new black cartridge in as I noticed air in the line and doing an ink fill after nozzle wash. I should have supplies arriving in the mail today to try some of the things suggested. thanks

 

[tattoo.dan]

it may be my pump too. hopefully that will get here today as well so I can swap that out....i need my black back!

 

[tattoo.dan]

I finally got a pic of my test prints to load. help!

 

[artbot]

can you cut off the test draw and scan it so it will be in perfect focus? it's very important to see almost microscopically what the test draw looks like in order to tell what and how bad it is.

...if you have bad caps they might be leaking air in the middle and not drawing ink into the middle (pull a vacuum from the back on those pump lines to see if you get bubbles and ink or just ink?).

that said,

that doesn't look like the tell tale sign of a clogged print head adapter. the fact that the same clogs runs from one print head to the next would be from a head crash. just guessing. you are going to need to pull those heads. you've already done that much cleaning cycles, it's time to clean them manually. it's not that big of a deal. the calibrations should still work when you put them back ink.

 

[tattoo.dan]

here are the scans

 

[sygns1]

head aches.

HI Dan
I have a jvc-75spII printer and a cg-75ml plotter. I purchased my equipment from grimco and had a service contract with them for years. Their service department was exelent. If you keep having that problem with your 75. give them a call. They are not cheap but they fixed every problem I had. If you look at their service contract there is a way tho get free service, purchase $1500.00 of material a month from them. If you are spending that much anyway you might as well enjoy the free service.
You can check out grimco on the web.
I live in seneca, Il which is about 75 miles from chicago (their closest branch but they dont seem to mind traveling.

Good Luck

Larry McLean
McLeans Sygns Shops

 

[artbot]

hmmm... at first glance, that does look like a vacuum related missing nozzle check. vacuum related ones have very big cleaned out areas, surrounded but pristine nozzles.

have you had the chance to push the heads over to the maintenance station and with a flash light look at the bottom of the heads? do they have and marks/scratches across the bottom? what worries me is that the missing nozzles run across the two heads in a consistent pattern. it's unlikely that they'd have vacuum issues in concert like this.

take the cap tops off the magenta/black and switch them with the cap tops on the cyan/yellow positions. this one is tricky and you need to do some eliminations.

 

[sygns1]

head aches II

I forgot to mention that they updated the firmware on the printer to version 7.30 a couple of years ago. the MRL-II2 is v2.40. I dont think you can get that accept thru an authorized service company.

You can get drivers, ICC profiles and the manuals from mimakiusa.com if you need them. Your software manufacturer and supply providers also have ICC profiles you can download.