Right in the middle of a linearization exercise, the K channel stopped working completely. I tried printing a single channel flush using Calibration Mode, but got absolutely nothing. Any ideas on how to clear the clog?
Any help would be appreciated.
Hey Will. Check your cartridge to make sure it’s not empty! If so, you’ll need to do an init fill on the printer. Just printing will not purge the air.
Did you switch to MK to see if it still would not print? This is the other test (if the PK cartridge is full).
-Walker
Yep - tried both of those tricks - the black channel does not print for either the pK or the mK. I think there must be a clog in the line feeding the print head.
I went through the whole cleaning procedure from your Youtube video on cleaning this printer and didn’t get anything.
I tried the ‘leave a Bounty towel strip soaked in PiezoFlush solution overnight under the printhead’ trick, and no luck there either. I am going to try that trick one more time and then I think the printer is going to have to go to the printer hospital.
When I print a nozzle check, I get absolutely nothing from the K channel.
This is most likely an air bubble that is stuck in the damper somehow.
If you put PK in the Yellow channel you can still print with this printer as a “P2” printer. PiezoDN and regular Piezography curves support this configuration.
-Walker
I sort of figured that there is either an air bubble or a pigment block in the line leading from the carts to the head. Is there any way to safely clear that - such as taking a small syringe and injecting Piezoflush into the small hole that take the ink from the cart?
And if I do have to reconfigure the printer using the Y cartridge as the pK do I have to edit the Quad files to reflect this. I’m not entirely clear on what the P2 configuration is…
I’m posting this in the interest of posterity after a conversation with my local printer repair guy and a Facebook dialog with Walker.
According to my local Epson repair guy, the Achilles heel of the R3000 (and 3800 and 3880) printers is the the black-ink switching part of the print head. As they get lots of use, the Glossy/Matte ink switching mechanism can get jammed and stop working altogether and kill the K channel. The best fix is replacing the print head, but that is costly - he estimated about $600 all in. Which makes no sense when I get an Epson refurbished R3000 for $500 if I lurk on the Epson site frequently enough.
What Walker suggested is to repurpose the unused Y channel (normally the K7 lightest gray channel in regular Peizography) to the K channel. I have to modify a shitload of the .quad files to copy the K values to the Y channel and then zero out the K channel values. But once I did that, it seems to be back on track.
So instead of sending the printer to the graveyard, I will probably be able to get some more mileage out of it.
Here’s a quick and easy K to P2 re-mapper for you.
Simply open the .quad in a text editor, paste in column 1, and select column 2 and copy into a new document (I suggest using TextWrangler or BBEdit) and save this txt file as your “newP2curve.quad”
best.
Walker
P2-remapper.xlsm.zip (49.1 KB)
Thanks! I was just about ready to write a little AWK script to do the same thing. But this will save me time!