i865 printer head

[stephen22]

I've got this lovely old Canon photoprinter and was chuffed to be able to run it from a Windows XP emulator in Virtualbox.

Bought a cheap set of inks, made some good pictures. Occasional use only. Suddenly I can't persuade any ink to come out of the colour nozzles. Prints blanks, all nozzle tests etc print using ink only from the big black cartridge, no colour at all. Cleaned, deep cleaned, removed examined and manually cleaned the print head which looks normal. Printer sings its little songs and the printhead dances about like normal, but no colour ink will print.

I can get a replacement print head from China for about £20 but not sure how likely this would be to solve the problem. Any advice would be most welcome.

 

[UpAndPrinting]

Did you use a printer syringe to flush the ink inside the printhead out? You need to do that as well.

 

[stephen22]

Thanks for swift reply. On your advice, tried to syringe out the individual ink channels, but no holes just a rounded protrusion for each colour cartridge. Managed to sloosh some colour ink through. Still no joy.

I thought it unlikely to be a physical blockage since having worked perfectly a couple of weeks ago the loss of all 4 colours was sudden and complete. It happens on several computers so unlikely to be a software problem. It seems to do everything else normally including cleaning, printing etc from the large black cartridge.

In the absence of any other ideas it might be worth spending £20 if there was a good chance a new head would solve the problem.

 

[stephen22]

Would be grateful for any advice about this.

 

[stephen22]

For anybody else who gets the same symptoms: got a new print head from China for £20 and it now works.

 

[UpAndPrinting]

If flushing doesn't restore a printhead, there's not much you can do but buy a new one like you did.