Ink gouping up on maintenance cartridge fiber material - HP Latex 630

[WRAPIFY]

Anyone see this before? Excess ink (and what looks like optimizer) on the maintenance cartridge fiber roll material. (see pics below). This is happening on our HP Latex 630. Has happened twice now (both times on separate maintenance cartridges).

Not sure when this ink buildup occurs (our guess is during "standby mode" automatic maintenance functions overnight). Whenever this buildup occurs, printheads (particularly the LM/LC printhead) seem to start banding severely. Upon examining the printhead nozzles, there's always a dried layer of ink covering nozzles (clearly the dried ink is coming from the maintenance cartridge ink buildup on the fiber material). This printhead nozzle clogging issue happens over and over after cleaning the printhead manually by hand until we pull out the maintenance cartridge and manually pre-feed the fiber material roll forward in order to get the excess ink areas out of sight of the printheads (by using the plastic wheel on the bottom of the maintenance cartridge and spinning it by hand). Is this normal?

 

[balstestrat]

Can't say if it's completely normal or not but say you have an issue, then most likely you have issue with the gears moving the cartridge. Which then results into that cloth not moving properly.

630 shouldn't do any maintenance when you are not using it and on that area it will spit on during the printing which is normal. Just that amount of overcoat seems excessive but maybe you are not using overcoat? and it's getting clogged because of that.

I should add, also make sure you are on the newest firmware. 6.30.1.13-202505291120

 

[WRAPIFY]

Sorry for the confusion. The "maintenance" that occurs during standby mode is more accurately termed "Background Services" (not exactly sure what type of services are applied during those moments, but definitely sounds like the machine does printhead and ink related/maintenance cartridge motions, probably to keep the printing system "ready to fire immediately" after turning the machine back on).

The overcoat you mentioned: On that particular 630, we actually do switch between using overcoat and not using overcoat (some media profiles, we setup with overcoat level set to 0).

What do you think about trying to soak the clogged printhead nozzles in distilled water to gently get rid of the dried ink and get nozzles firing normally again? (or any ideas to clear the nozzles back)? Printhead cleaning via the machine's menu features does nothing to resolve since the ink is dried (comes off like dried paint chips if scratched off).

 

[balstestrat]

Yeah just clean en you got nothing to lose.
But you have to get the cartridge issue fixed if it's piling up so high it's touching that waste.