HP Designjet 5500 printing issues?

[syn1ders]

My printer has suddenly started printing horizontal (magenta) stripes thru-out the entire length of my job. It does this intermittantly, sometimes it will print most of the job okay until it gets to the end or sometimes it will print these stripes all the way thur the job. Can anyone tell me what in Sam Hill is going on?. My suspicions printhead outdated
hit me up if you have any suggestions.

 

[Billct2]

Don't think it's the printhead. That would usually be a missing color not extra color.
But you could try switching it out.
Try asking on the HP board.

 

[syn1ders]

Thanks a bunch how do i get there from here.

 

[syn1ders]

In the immortal words of Emily Fratella of Saturday Night Live.... "Never mind"

 

[syn1ders]

okay here's the rub... i've tried a few methods to overcome the horizontal lines my suspicions are the heads need to be changed. also the carriage got caught in the material prior to this; could this have caused the problem? please see attached photo. Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Billct2]

Again,I doubt that is caused by a bad printhead or a bumped carriage.
Have you tried a test print (the on board one) or tried any other files?
Have you rebooted , both the printer & computer?

 

[Bly]

I doubt it's a head.
The headstrike may have something to do with it.
As Bill suggested, reboot the printer and run the image quality test print 1.
That will show how the heads are firing.
Wipe the encoder strip, lube the rails.
Could possibly be a belt on it's way out.

 

[syn1ders]

check again

Belt was recently changed. will check encoder strip. and test print mode; thanks guys- i'll let u no how thing go.

 

[miker]

It's a problem with the connection to the magenta printhead. check the connection on the ribbon cable on the back of the carriage.

Essentially, if you loose connection with a printhead it will act shorted and fire all the time. I have seen Seiko, HP, and Gandi printers all exhibit this behavior.

 

[TyrantDesigner]

+1 to what mike said, also check encoder and lastly try printing from different sources, Had this one time when we were sending massive art and the image wasn't buffering correctly from computer to printer.

 

[syn1ders]

You may have something there ... seems when I combine vector and bitmapped images together this happens, it doesn't occur when I do them separately. also I wonder if getting lube oil on encoder strip caused this. PS what would you consider massive file?

 

[TyrantDesigner]

PS what would you consider massive?

10 foot long panels at 300 dpi raster in a gang run of 5-10 panels. Also should note, system only had a gig of ram and was sending through usb 1.0 cable at the time. we upped a month later to an ethernet setup w/ a 6 gig system dedicated to printing which fixed that problem long run. short term fix was to flatten files that had vector components and reduce gang runs to 2-3 prints.