Printer Technicians?

[Jbird22]

Does anyone happen to be a printer technician? If so, I could use a little help troubleshooting a problem I'm having with a Canon large format plotter.

[simpzenith]

I work in the large format printing field but I only have experience with Roland, Vutek, HP SciTex and Inca printers. Maybe I can help or put you in touch with someone who can. I take it you can't get tech support from Canon?

[Jbird22]

I sent Canon tech support a descriptive email but haven't received a response yet. I know a tech I can call but I'm trying to troubleshoot it myself in hopes of a more economical fix due to my profession.

Here's what's happened. Maybe you can offer up some advice based on your experience with other brands:

Well, it started out giving me a "printhead needs cleaning" message...so I ran both A and B type cleanings multiple times only to see my problem worsen...The problem is that Cyan will only print in streaks, nozzles inside printhead are clogged...I removed the printhead and tried to manually unclog the nozzles using a rag with a little alcohol on it...It seemed to free up the clog but when I re-installed the printhead it won't even attempt to print cyan at all now. For some reason though, my brand new Cyan cartridge is showing to be drained to half capacity even though it has printed a single line. To top things off, now my plotter has slowed down to a snail's pace when trying to plot in black/white and is attempting to plot in color even though I have it set to monochrome in my AutoCAD plot settings. I'm thinking the printhead needs replacing but I'm a school teacher and my classroom budget is not really deep so I'm trying every way I can to remedy this myself. Any ideas?

[simpzenith]

I don't know what type of print head the Canon uses but with some heads, you can damage the membrane if you try to manually clean it. I assume it uses a piezo electric head and those things are pretty robust. Maybe you got the contacts dirty and the head just needs to be removed, clean the contacts and re-seat it. As far as the other problems, try using another Cyan cartridge and do a complete shut down of the plotter and unplug it. Sometimes that's all any electronic device needs. I know printheads are very expensive so maybe you have an old one you can try to see it corrects some of the other problems even if that head doesn't print well and/or swap it with one of the other color printheads as long as you can purge the ink out of the head after the tests. These are just suggestions based on my experience so without know the specifics of the Canon printer, they're really just guesses.

[Jbird22]

Sounds like your diagnosis is exactly what I'm thinking. I'm thinking I might have messed up the circuitry on the head itself when I was trying to clean it.

This is the printhead: http://www.amazon.com/Canon-PF-03-Printhead/dp/B005GGONKQ

I just can't understand why it has slowed down so much and is still trying to print color while set to monochrome print settings.

[simpzenith]

It's possible that you may have shorted out the print head board or motherboard. Printers are funny sometimes and one problem can cause strange, other problems. Try my suggestions and see if that corrects the problems first. Of course you probably know to disconnect the power when doing any work so not to cause any board damage.

[Jbird22]

I sure hope it's something simple but I'm not getting my hopes up. I will try your recommendations first thing tomorrow morning. At this point I'd be perfectly fine with it printing monochrome only if the speed would just pick back up to normal.

[Jbird22]

Update: Came in this morning and printer was running at normal speed again...why?...who knows. Anyway, it still will not print in blue and is printing in color even when monochrome or gray scale is selected. Maybe it's missing the blue in the mix that makes it gray?? After a call to a service tech where I bought the machine, I ordered a new print head and a pair of maintenance cartridges. I hope after spending $600 I hope this is the remedy to my problem!