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Designjet 500 Fading Print

Posted by Bob Wert on

Hello from New Zealand.

Since I have replaced the belt on my printer I have printed in black and white mostly but not much. I tried printing today but after a few sheets it start to hit and miss the ink. It was as if it was spraying ink in some place and not in the others and in the final sheet it virtually didn’t print anything. I did a print test page and it didn’t print in color and was mostly yellow and black. I didn’t get any error message or anything until I ran a align printhead test and it gave errors on all 4 printheads. One with faulty error 0234, two with worn out messages and one with faulty error 0334. Any idea what might be the issue here.

I did change the print heads prior to the belt replacement. I read some other forums where they said to re connect trailing cable to emodule etc etc. where they had similar issues after a belt replacement.

Thought I would run it by you first.Are you able to advise me on this?

Many thanks.

Best Regards

SHAMIR KHAN


I am assuming this plotter is a Designjet 500 or 800 from the error code indicated from the first email.

This problem has nothing to do with the trailing cable.  The print heads nozzles dry up over time if they are not used.  The easiest fix is to remove the print heads and spay the nozzles at close range with Windex or some other product that has ammonia in it.  Then press the print head nozzles onto a pile of paper towels to pull the Windex and disolved ink out.  Then put the print heads back into the machine and do a print head alignment to get ink through all the heads.  You might have to do this more than once to get all the nozzles working again. 

It is a good idea to get ink through every head every other day or so to keep them from drying out.

Let me know if I can be of any further help.


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  • Just purchased a used Designjet 500 24" that has not been used in several months. The previous owner turned it on and did what I assume was a print test. There were several “chunks” of dried black ink that slid down the paper and the blank ink printed VERY lightly and the colors did not print at all. I’m assuming I’ll have to clean the print heads at the very least and replace the ink cartridges. There were no error messages and none when I turned it on when I got it home. Can someone walk me thru the steps of finding out what else I may need to clean, check or replace? Could the ink tube system be clogged? How do I find this out? The belt seemed flexible with no obvious visible cracks or stiffness. Is there a proper step by step order to go thru a checkout process to ascertain any problems the printer has?

    Any help would be greatly appreciated. I’ve not dealt with this type of printer before and guess you could call me a “newbie” with it though I’m very capable with the computer itself.

    Dan

    Dan Kosko on

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