 Hi guys, it's Kevin. Today we're going to talk about how to make your own continuous ink system. There are more and more companies like Epson and Canon. They have the EcoTank and MegaTank, those are continual ink systems. They put the continual ink system on, let's say, a $50 printer. They sell it for $300. Why not let me show you how to make your own CS? There are lots of models, there's lots of theory behind it. I really want to be focused and I want to be pretty through why it works. So maybe you can make your own CS after watching this. Okay, the first one, I'm going to talk about ink tank. Basically you can put a CS on any kind of printers. For example, if you have a printer and you have a big bottle of ink, your idea maybe I have a tube goes into the cartridge. However your problem is, the ink level always changes. For example, if your cartridge is here, now your ink level is here, the ink is going to flow into the cartridge and dumping your printer. And then when you consume the ink to here, your cartridge is here, so you cannot suck it in because it's too low. The ink level is too low, so the ink will flow from your cartridge back to the bottle. Actually I have designed a CS for a company that they run 200 meters of printers. I mean they have multiple printers span 200 meters. They have a big showroom. Then in the middle they have a bucket. They dump the whole bucket of ink in one bucket. Then all the printers suck from that bucket. And if you design correctly, you can do some really, really fancy things. Okay, so please be patient. Go through every episode of this series, then you can design your own CS. So have you ever seen a pad water dispenser? You have a big tank of water, then tank coming down. This ink level is always constant. Whenever you pad drinking water from here, and then there will be water flowing in to replenish this smaller tank. So a big tank and a small tank. And how about the way you use this kind of design? Okay, the split tank design is exactly like this. You have a big tank and you have a smaller tank. And this is the plug. It blocks the refill hole and this is the air hole. So this kind of tank works. The fourth thing is you try to let all the water flow into the big tank. Then you put it up. You can see there is an ink level difference between the smaller tank and the bigger tank. And that looks exactly like our pad water dispenser. And now you pull off this air plug. This plug needs to be opened because this is where the air supply is. To prevent dirt fall into it, you can put something on top, for example, this air filter. So where do we put this CS tank? The printhead is here. We need to put a printhead between the ink level of the smaller tank and the bigger tank. Normally I just put a neck to the printer and that works. I like this first design the most. It's really easy to troubleshoot. And you get an ink level difference and you know it's working. If you have any leak or anything, you know right away. And the limitation is you have to put this at the same level of your printhead. So that's one restriction. So if you go to bchtechnologies.com and go to accessories and ink tank, you're going to see lots of ink tank designs, different sizes. What about other ink tanks? So with the same idea, how about this big guy? This is over 500 mil tank. Will this work for this printer? Absolutely. As long as you can have ink difference between the smaller one and the smaller tank and the bigger tank, it will work. So this is just smaller, this is just bigger. How about this guy? This is called a mini tank. Here's the big tank. The difference is, see right now the big tank doesn't have a plug. It only has one plug. So what you do is you add ink from the small tank and then you tilt over, make sure all the ink flow to the big tank. Then you plug it. If you see here in the middle, there's a hole. So actually this air hole is here. This plug is not supposed to plug in when you use the CS. This plug only should be plugged when you transport the tank. Okay, we're still on the first design. Here is a soft priming design. Remember we have to tilt it over and then move it back and then we put the filter on it. This design doesn't have a filter, it's a filterless. This is a big tank and this one is a smaller tank. And this is air hole and this is a refill hole. So it is designed when you refill it. You refill this way and remove the plug. So when you tilt it back, it's already primed. So you don't have to remember how to prime it. So you'll prime it just by adding the ink. Here's one action. Basically when you open it, all the ink will automatically flow to the bottom. You can see the design divider here is a lot shorter or cut up a lot shorter than the first clear tank I showed you. That's because it's designed so when you open it, all the ink flow to the bottom. So when you close it, it's already primed. Now let's talk about the second design. Second tank design. This is the shaped tank. Sometimes you can see this, it looks exactly like this guy. However, there's no divider over the two tanks. Instead of here, it has a column. And here is the refill plug. This one you can see there's a divider here. So there's a divider, there's a refill plug, there's air hole. In here, the air hole looks like this and there's no divider. What happens is there's a membrane here. So basically it controls how much ink you can suck off from the tank. And therefore it just selects the water dispenser but it's controlled by the membrane here. We don't have a smaller one here because for some reason I just like to see how it works. So here if this is a malfunction, there's no way you can know it. So let's say the drawback is you don't know if it's working or not. If something goes wrong, you don't know if it's this pressure problem or other problem. However, for this design, the ink is not controlled by the ink level. The ink is controlled by this membrane. So you can almost put this one anywhere. Okay, this is designed for underneath the printer. So you can put a printer on top of it. And let me show you where the column is. So you can see there's an air hole here and there's a column. And another one on the edge of this design is you can put it somewhere. You can put it right on the cartridge. For example, this is 65 cartridge. And if you follow my other video, this is the tube. Here's a tube opening the air hole. And here's the refill hole. You can take a cartridge, cut the top off, replace it with this cap. And now you have a mini-CS inside your printer. And the third design is called chamber design. The design is like this. They cut a tank to a series of chambers. And they're at a different size. And then there's a small connection among the chambers. So for example, when your ink is high, maybe you want the ink to be harder to suck it out because your ink is high, there's a pressure already. And when the ink is low, you may want to make the chamber a little bit bigger. And so it's easier to get the ink out. And so you can see this kind of design also depends on where you put this tank. So there's a printhead right here. The printhead has to be within this range. Here's an example of the chamber design. If you see closely, you can see there's horizontal lines of the chambers. So when the ink will conceal more ink, you're going to see there are more chambers underneath. Okay, here's the all three different kinds of tank designs. I hope you take those ideas and play around and maybe start your own new design. And please let me know if it works. I hope you liked this video. Cheers!