Thursday 31 May 2012

Seek and ye shall find.

I had what I thought was a good idea, put a normal ink cartridge in the 3D printer, one with ink in and then see if it would print, that would rule out binder issues and perhaps I would get to see some printing. The printer's cartridges are based on Canon BC-20's and they simply decapitate them, remove the ink and wadding and glue a plastic screw top vial that has had its bottom cut off over the hole in the bottom of the cartridge. These vials have a screw cap which is compatible with the machine hose lines. I was given a bag of the vials so just hooked the lines to an empty one, it certainly proved that the binder pumps OK.  But alas still no joy, now I was getting errors, too many deprimes! This seems to be when the fluidic connection between the reservoir and nozzle is lost, seemed unlikely it was caused by the fresh out of the package ink cartridge. A guy on the forum suggested it might be the flex pcb type ribbon cable that runs to the cartridge so I took it off and had a look. And it seems it is definitely damaged.


This is the part that contacts with the cartridge. Now let's get all CSI on its ass, zoom in on sector D5.


And there is our problem, one of the tracks has broken and even peeled back, now give me a hard copy of that. But BladeRunner references aside the cable and I have a date under the stereo microscope with some very thin wire and a very small soldering iron. I'd better lay off the caffeine now! Fingers crossed this is the issue because I am so close now to printing something.

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