 Welcome to BCH Technologies. This is Kevin. Today we're going to talk about how to unclog dried Epson OEM inks. Many people keep using Epson's OEM ink because they believe that Epson OEM ink won't clog the printhead. Actually, dried pigment ink is the hardest type of ink to unclog, and sometimes using Epson will make things worse. Since we're talking about ink, let's see the difference between dye ink and pigment ink. Dye ink is designed to penetrate paper and bind with media underneath. Therefore, the dry ink dries similar to salt, and we can consider it as salt water. All the colorants in it is totally dissolved. So if dye ink clogs, we can just add water and dissolve it. Here's an example of dye ink. You can see the yellow can be see-through, and it's totally transparent. So when you need a cleaning solution, it's for tougher clogs of dye ink. The cleaning solution will have dispersant, and we'll just make the process quicker and more thorough. On the contrary, the pigments are the particles suspended in the water. They are not dissolved. And they lay on top of the paper. This is what gives the pigment a clear, laser-sharp look. If you remember the dye ink, it penetrates, but in the process of penetrates, it also bleeds. So the penetration not only goes deeper and also spreads, but because the pigment only lays on top, their shape is more controlled. So that's why it looks sharper. However, because the ink layer lies on the surface, we need a pigment to bind to the paper as strongly as possible. Therefore, the pigment is more like cement. When it's wet, it can move around, but once it's set, it's set for good. And here's an example of the Epson 3640, and this is how many pages are printed before it's clogged. And this printer only printed 400 pages before it's clogged. And here's an example of the pigment ink. You can see the yellow is not transparent, because the color is not dissolved, it's not salt water, and it's just a small, really small particle suspended in this liquid matrix. The dye ink looks like color salt, and the pigment ink looks like cheese. So that's the easiest way to distinguish the ink. So I just used this as an example. So if we just lay on top of it, get some particle lay on top of it, and it'll be really easy to just blow away. So we need something to bind those particles to the paper. The pigment particles are attracted by the physical force and designed to be as unbreakable as possible. So if we see a freeze as an anti-smudging in a pigment ink's description, such as Epson's Dior Brite ink, that means it will have a really strong bond to the paper. And fortunately, it's very hard to remove after it's bound to the surface. If we use an electron microscope to zoom in on the pigment particles, we'll find their strips are not round balls. Instead, the particles have holes within holes, which make the particle surface extremely large compared to its volume. These holes and tiny volumes make the particles physically attract to each other or paper surface. Therefore, the pigment bond is a physical bond and not a chemical bond. Anyway, saying there's a cleaning solution can dissolve pigment is not telling the truth. The cleaning solution can make the cement wet, and therefore weakening the bond between the pigment particles. Therefore, we normally soak the printhead in the cleaning solution first. However, we'll need more physical activity afterwards, and wetting process can now solve the problem by itself. Epson has some building functions, which we'll discuss later, and we'll also add some of action ourselves. Now we need to talk about the seaward. Corrosion. Another way to dissolve the pigment rather than wetting it is to dissolve the pigment particles by corrosion. Corrosion is certainly not the best way to solve the problem, but it may be the only way. When I was a PhD candidate in ecology, many years ago, after we tried all the fancy methods trying to solve the pollution problem, the last choice was always let's just dilute the pollution source. There's a saying, the solution to pollution is dilution. There are many people who use household... Basically, sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do. There are many people who use household cleaners. Basically, those cleaners corrode the printhead and everything around the clock, so the clock can dislodge. It works, but it might not be the best way to do it because it might damage the printhead. At the BCH, we do not use the household cleaners, and we will not recommend using them. There are two kinds of cleaning solutions. The green cleaning solution is only a wetting agent. It doesn't have any corrosive components, and it's absolutely safe for the printhead. We can leave the liquid inside the printhead for days without damaging it. We can use it when it's hot or at room temperature. We can also leave the bottle uncapped. A wet cleaning solution has corrosive agents, but also have many counter-corrosive protective agents, as well as a group of surfactants. The process is just like you line up your stomach liner with a pectin, then you can drink alcohol. The process is what we call the controlled corrosion. When you use it properly, only the ink will be affected and the printhead will be safe. The protective agents will coat the printhead and prevent the printhead from damage. Once the surface of the clock breaks down, surfactants will carry debris away and let the solution work on a new surface. But this solution can only be used at room temperature to not heat it up and cannot be left inside the printhead more than 24 hours. We did not sell this to the public before. However, we think we should give people a choice regarding the last chance to save a printer. In this episode, because we are dealing with a dried pigment, we'll use the wet cleaning solution. Remember, keep at room temperature and close the lid after use. Before we talk about clogging, let's get familiar with the anatomy of the Epson printhead. Epson's printhead is always locked into a position. To unlock it, we needed to use a printer's building function to pretend we are changing the cartridge. The lock is right here. The printer has a door switch on the top. If we put a piece of paper here, it will fold the printer to think the printhead's cover is closed. So we can illustrate the procedure easier. We also like a setup, maintenance, cartridge replacement, and ask for a replace cartridge on the press, the blue key. And it asks us to open the lid because we have this thing for the printer to think the lid is closed. So we just unleash this. And now we cut the power off. So after we cut the power off, now we can slide this easily. We'll put a piece of paper towel underneath so we can catch the waste ink. So what we do is we fold the paper towel in half, then fold it into a third. And this would be a perfect size to go underneath the printhead. We need to keep the printer unplugged because Epson may want to move the printhead. We don't want our hands get caught or damaging the printer's cable. Epson's printhead sits right here. And you can see the label, the Y label there. And then you have a cartridge set on the top. And here's the ink intake from the cartridge. And if we take a part, the Epson's printhead is composed of three layers. The top layer is the ink intake layer. The top plate has four ink intakes, one for each color. The top plate split each ink color into two injection tubes. Let's say this is black. And the black gets split into two tubes. And this is cyan. And if you flip over, the cyan is split into two. The magenta is split into two. And the yellow gets split into two. Then the rubber layer is for sealing the top plate and the bottom plate. So it's just for the seal. So I know your question will be, oh, why does the top plate split each color into two? The ink just scored tiny ink drops on the paper to print. The ink is scored from a little tiny hole called the nozzle. To achieve a higher resolution, of course, we want the nozzle to be as dense as possible. However, there's a physical limit on how dense the nozzles can be placed together. So this is physically impossible. So absence solution is, OK, I'm going to split each color into two. And so when the printer moves around like this, this has the same effect as this impossible. So if we take this printhead out, and then we already talk about the top layer, and we talk about the middle layer, the rubber layer. OK, now we're going to cover the bottom and this most important layer. So remember on your left is black, black cyan, magenta, yellow. So black is actually this two. And then cyan one here, one top, magenta and yellow. You get eight holes, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And when you print, when it prints, here's the black nozzles. So you have basically four columns. Two columns are black, those two. Then on those two columns, you got two cyan, two magenta and two yellow. There are three things that mix up the printhead. We have a series of delicate electronic components. The driver IC. If I flip it over, it looks like this. OK, one problem is if you squeeze too hard, if you have too much fluid pressure, the ink will leak from this middle layer because they just put it together by the screw. So when it leaks, it will soak the IC board and create a short circuit and fry the printhead. So we have an ink coming in here. And then the second component here, if I blow it up. So the first thing is on the top, we have a driver IC. The ink comes down, it's going to a reservoir. And from the reservoir, it goes in. It's called the ink channel. I know you cannot see inside, and the two-dimensional diagram may not make sense. So I made a 3D model. So when the inks come in, and here's the channel. So the ink flows in, and it goes through this little tiny tube here, and then comes out. The second thing is called a thin film piezo. So you have a really thin film here, and then there's a piece of material, which is a chip. So when you have electricity, the ink is going to expand, and therefore it squeezes. So when it squeezes this tube, a little droplet comes out. And the print-up have a series of tubes of ink channels. Then it has all those little piezos, and then they come out with a wire. So they just like a play piano. They squeeze each one, and then there's a tiny, tiny hole, which is a third thing called the nozzle. The nozzle is going to squirt the ink droplet out. So you have three things, again. I see the chipboard, which cannot get wet, and you get the TFP thin film piezo, which is this, the thing up as a piano key. And then you have a little tiny hole, which is the nozzle. That's all it is for the print-up. It might make sense to show the two dimensional diagram here. So you get the ink comes in from the ink reservoir, and they go through the ink channel. You get the TFP, which is like a piano key, squeeze this, and then it come out as an ink drop from the nozzle. So here is the piezo actuators look like. And then here are the different ink cavities. And here, if you look underneath, you get those little tiny nozzles, that's 84.7 microns apart. And if you compare to over 3D models, it comes in, going through. And then absence of play piano on this. So what do we learn from this? So first thing is the ink chamber has to be filled with ink. If the chamber is filled with air, then the TFP won't be able to generate enough pressure to push the ink out. On the other hand, if the clocking can be in the ink chamber, so you can have a clock here somewhere here, to prevent ink going out. Also, if we damage some of the delicate TFP structure, because here it's a really thin film, the printhead will permanently damage. And number four, of course, we cannot get an electronic unit wet. So we want to jump ahead and discuss direct flushing method for unclogging. The direct flushing involves putting a paper towel underneath the printhead, and then you hook it up with a tube from the top. Then you're going to inject a cleaning solution into the printhead from the ink intake. Therefore, the clog will be pushed out from the nozzle. This method is one of the most effective solutions and is widely used. If we look at the above model of the ink reservoir and the ink channel, I will remind you one thing, the Pascal's principle. Okay, get your high school physics teacher on the line and call her and tell her actually her stuff is useful. Okay, this is how we actually jack up a car. Okay, you get a jack, which is smaller on one side, another one is on the top. Except now, we're using the large area to inject it back. So what's the problem here? So pushing too hard might cause a leak in the rubber layer and therefore get an IC board wet. Once the IC board is wet, it's almost impossible to dry it out unless we open it up. If the printhead is not dried properly, it might cause a short circuit right here and permanently damage the printhead. If you refresh the printhead, your mother-in-law will not be happy because you burnt her printer. When she's not happy, you'll get this invited from her family reunion. If we see an error 0x0x92a after we flushed the printhead, the motherboard is toasted. The second thing is you may also damage the thin film inside the printhead that we mentioned earlier. Therefore, the direct flushing is effective if the clock is minor. But it's not a good idea for harder clog. In the following sessions, we'll discuss how we do the direct flushing a little bit differently. The video game is getting long, so let's do a practical example first. So we're going to do a dye printer in this section. On this printer, we pick up at the quickslist for $30. The owner use purely epsin ink until it clogged. We threw in the storage for another three years. So the first thing we do is clean up the printer and switch it to dye ink. Okay, final check. All the refill holes are clogged. All the air holes are open. Okay, let's put the epsin clogged. Okay, let's put the epsin cartridge to where it belongs. Trash can. Okay, another check. Since we got a blank page for the nozzle check, we need to unclog all the colors. So we pretend to have a cartridge change and then as soon as the printhead moves, we unplug the power. And therefore we can move the cartridge freely using the printer. We'll put a piece of paper towel underneath the printhead to catch any overflows of ink or cleaning solution. All those tools on the cleaning solution can be found at bchtechnologies.com and go to accessories. And then you can click anti-clogging agent. That's all the cleaning solutions. And also you can go to a priming clip. You can find the flashing syringe and the titration tubes. The flashing syringe is just syringe with a piece of tubing. And the titration tube are two pieces of tubes. One is larger, one is smaller. We're going to fill the syringe, the flashing syringe with about three to four mils of cleaning solutions. Okay, here goes back to our model again. So let's say we have some clocks here. And rather than we pushing the liquid and the clock through a really tiny hole, what we'd rather do is actually suck the clock back and suck it out of the tube. And then if we have an energy remaining clock, we want to fill this whole chamber with cleaning solution. So the cleaning solution will break this part, at least make it soft so it can suck it out again. So we start with pushing in a little bit. And then we draw the bad ink backwards into the syringe. And then we pump it a little bit again. And then we draw and pump and draw. Before you remove the syringe and discard the dirty ink and solution, the last action is you still want to push a little bit more cleaning solution into the printhead. Now we can move to the next color. Your goal is get a little bit of cleaning solution into the printhead and remove the large clocks. So you won't be able to unclog the printhead right away. So don't do it excessively. And you don't have to do it again and again until the ink is clear. And the only thing you need to do is put a little bit of solution into the printhead. OK, now it's the hard work. Put a new pad on and then bring out the hydration tubes. There are two pieces of tube. So you'll cut a bigger tube. Then you slide a little bit of the smaller tube inside the large tube. Are you confused? OK, it looks like this. So you got a bigger tube. And then if you see the top of it, you got a piece of small tube. And they fit each other nicely. So the small tube is to fit the ink intake. And the larger tube is for holding the ink. Now we're going to fill each tube with a cleaning solution. There will be air bubbles sandwiched between the cleaning solution and the printhead. So we're going to use syringe and use as a plunger. Just move up and down the plunger. You're going to see the air bubbles coming up and the cleaning solution goes into the ink intake. We're going to add a little bit more cleaning solutions. And also we use the needle as a plunger to remove the air bubbles. Because it's dye ink and also we use the red cleaning solution, which is super powerful. So the solution will cut through the dye clog just like a knife in a butter. So we're going to just leave it for an hour and see what happens. Okay, after an hour and we can see a couple tubes are empty. That means it's unclogged. The solution will have to fall through the printhead and onto our pad. That's a success. Okay, don't get too excited. We've got a couple more colors to do. So we add the cleaning solutions to those empty tubes. And then we bring out our syringe plunger. Just keep removing the air bubbles. Okay, here's about two hours later. You can see previously those three get drained out. So this one still has to flow properly because there are some air bubbles here. And you can see the blue one is unclogged. So we just need those two to work on. Don't forget to change the pad at each iteration. Just about 20 minutes later, you can see this is black. The black is unclogged. Now we only got the yellow one. So we do the same thing. We move the plunger up and down to give a good mix. And hope can unclog in another 20 minutes. Okay, 20 minutes later, actually it's faster than I thought. It's unclogged. So it's time to suck out the remaining solutions and also remove the titration tubes. Just be careful when you remove the tubes. Make sure you remove both the large and the small tubes. Sometimes small tubes get stuck in the intake. So you probably need a plier and remove the smaller tube. And after that, use a paper towel to dry the printhead. And you are all set to go. You still have a cleaning solution inside the printhead. So use the printer's building routine to clean your printhead at least two or three times before you print another check. Okay, we did two cleanings and it looked pretty good except the light sign. And here's your decision. You want to do it again or just like me. I don't use the light sign too much and it's looking okay. So I'm going to print a sample to see what the printout looks like. So I can decide if I can live with it. And also the clog is a bit small. It may get taken care of by the remaining cleaning solutions. So lots of time if you just set up printer overnight. The second day will fix itself. So in the next part, we're going to discuss a little bit more about how to unclog the pigment ink printer. And we're going to show you a more method to unclog it. It's getting long. So if you're interested in your pigment printer, so go to the next section. Okay, have a good day. Bye. Thank you for watching. Visit us at bchtechnologies.com or locally at Greensboro, North Carolina. Thank you. Cheers.