Keeping Epson 3880 Print Head Unclogged?

[Bob Rockefeller]

I have managed to combine my dead Epson 3880 (severely plugged or failed print head) together with a used printer from eBay to get a nicely working printer with almost a full set of inks between them.

I searched here and on DuckDuckGo for some information on the best way to avoid future print head plugging, but didn't come up with anything helpful. I don't print every day and sometimes don't print every week. Living in southeastern Georgia, USA, I assume low humidity won't be a problem for me.

Can someone point me to something?

I know that many have suggested:

• Turning the printer off between long (days) gaps in printing
• Keeping the printer covered to avoid dust and animal hair (lots of dogs and a cat here)
• Doing weekly nozzle checks and cleaning if needed

What else?

If I store the partially used ink tanks from the dead printer in zip-lock bags, will they be OK to use in the good printer when needed?

[Jager]

I think your clogging challenges with your 3880 are/were very atypical, Bob.  The 3880, along with its 3800 predecessor, was arguably the most trouble-free pigment photo printer Epson ever built.  Are you sure you didn't get a 4900 with a 3880 badge?!  (just kidding, of course).

That said, your experience is your experience.  Glad to hear you've managed to get it working again!

As for keeping it unclogged, given its general reputation for NOT clogging, it's hard to know what to suggest.  I'd keep it turned off when not using it, so the heads are parked.  I'd cover it with something to keep dust and cat/dog hair away (nothing really to do with clogging).  And, otherwise, I'd just use it when the need/desire hits.  

I print most days, nowadays.  But in a previous life I would sometimes go 2-3 months between print sessions - and experienced no problems.  Hopefully you're now-repaired 3880 will exhibit that same kind of yeoman reliability.

[howardm]

I agree.  I've had a 3800 and a 3880.  The 3800 was a clog queen and the 3880 is much better.  *almost* never clogs and if it does, it's the cyan (always) channel.  The auto nozzle check always clears it but I do try to print a test page every week or two.

I got a cover from digitaldeckcovers.com and in the winter a humidifier.  I dont think there is that much more to do other than perhaps keep a small water tank *inside* the printer and maybe a tiny hygrometer.

I'm not 100% convinced that the head is 'unparked' (ie. exposing the head to air) as long as it's turned on.  Does anyone have any actual proof?  I leave my 3880 powered on pretty much all the time.

[Bob Rockefeller]

Any thoughts on this?

If I store the partially used ink tanks from the dead printer in zip-lock bags, will they be OK to use in the good printer when needed?

[Some Guy]

Epson claims a 2 year shelf life past the date on the box.  Some get longer than that.  I suspect a dye ink will not separate out like some pigments where you might need to shake them up from time to time.  I've had refill bottles where if I tilt the bottle, the ink clings to the sides like a sludge and has to be shaken well.  I also do the zip-bag for storage as I switch out ink carts a lot, or store them for a few days when I tear into the print head area which requires a major tear-down.

As to what cleanings I do with the couple of 3880's I have, I squirt some head cleaner onto the two white pads in the capping station to flush out the old ink until they are white again.  Just a 10 ml syringe works well enough.  I have run a rag paper cleaning sheet through the feed system under the head at times soaked with alcohol when the head dribbles black on the print; probably build-up of dust, hair, lint, or whatever as the sides of the head does seem to build up a gooey sludge at times where I've torn into the thing and pulled the head out.  Looks like a black molasses and a big PITA to do that though.

I swab the wiper and the seal around the capping station with a cut in half Q-tip where I shove the cut stem into a small 12" length of hobby store brass tubing for an extension handle.  Then I can flick the dirty Q-tip out easily and insert another to clean it along with a pre-dip into the head cleaner.

I also keep the printers under a full vinyl cover and place a small dish of those plant gel-beads with water to keep the humidity up under the cover.

Also, I had a really bad clog recently on one 3880 that did the PK to MK and back to PK thing.  PK was not responding at all on the subsequent prints.  Did an Auto Nozzle check which filled the maintenance tanks with however many cleanings that did.  Let it sit overnight and some more nozzles came back online with another cleaning.  Really is an asinine and wasteful system they came up with doing the black ink switching.  Seems they could develop a MK & PK universal black ink and forego the need to switch and clean all the time, but they likely want to sell $$ ink too.  Not as bad as their old 10000 series than came with a third flush tank used in between the PK to MK changes.

SG

[Bob Rockefeller]

Thanks for the details. I'm not sure I'm up to all of that, but I'll take a closer look and my printer storage and routine cleaning.

[howardm]

Any thoughts on this?

I'm usually over-cautious on things like this but I think putting a piece of tape (like electrical) over the port is enough.

put them in a vacuum sealer bag and run the vacuum for extra credit.

[Arlen]

My 3800 used to have occasional clogs that were cleared by a standard head cleaning cycle or two. Then after a few years, one day it clogged and refused to be cured by all standard, non-standard and heroic treatments, as yours did. Considering the ink supply that comes with new printers, it was cheaper to buy a new 3880 than to replace the print head on the 3800.

That was 5 years ago. I have kept the 3880 covered with a fitted dust cover (something I didn't do with the 3800), because an Epson technician told me that dust is a major cause of such failures. I print a test image that exercises all nozzles at least once per week, and run a nozzle check. I have only had a gap in the nozzle check pattern a couple of times during this five years, each time cleared by a single standard cleaning cycle. The printer is in Oregon, where we typically have high humidity in winter, low-moderate humidity in summer. I'm not sure which factor contributes most to these good results, but it seems to work.

[Dale_Cotton2]

Data point re clogging. Had a 3800 that behaved nicely until I pretty much took a year's sabbatical from photography. I just plain forgot to do a print, sometimes for months at a time. After a particularly long episode of neglect, sure enough I had several magenta nozzles clogged, and nothing would touch some of them. Now I've had a 3880 for maybe two years with maybe two single-nozzle clogs, both of which cleared with a single cleaning. But it's never gone more than a week without use.

an Epson technician told me that dust is a major cause of such failures.

One source of infiltration that I hadn't been aware of until recently is the back of cut-sheet paper. When I print, I remove a sheet from the box, put it on a flat surface, then brush the coated surface. A bout of ink-blobbing got me inspecting each sheet very carefully after brushing but before insertion. Occasionally found something the brush hadn't touched. One day, for some reason I thought to turn the paper over to inspect that surface too. A few days later I found a 2 inch brush hair tagging along for the ride. Hate to think what that would have done wandering around inside the printer.

Data point re ink life. Had the 3800 for 5 years. Never did MK in all that time, until just before the end. So still had the original MK cartridge in place, albeit with most of its content gone from cleaning cycles. Had the habit of removing and briefly shaking each cartridge maybe once per year when changing an emptied cartridge. Finally did a batch of MK prints for a friend toward the end. No visible problem.

But in counterpoint, Mark has cautioned on these pages that he has good evidence of problems with sufficiently past-date pigment ink.

[Arlen]

Good points, Dale. For some time now I routinely brush both sides of my cut sheet papers, for the reasons you stated.

As for ink lifetime:  while it's impossible to say that under no circumstances will older cartridges yield inferior results, over the years I've checked test-chart prints from fresh cartridges against the same targets a couple of years after the expiration date, with no visible differences. At one point I had a problem with my 3800 that I thought might be attributable to an out-of-date cartridge, but it turned out not to be that. When I talked to an Epson technician about it, he told me that the "expiration date" is just a general recommendation, and that in their lab, they use cartridges that are several years out of date all the time, and have never seen a problem.

[alain]

...  I also do the zip-bag for storage as I switch out ink carts a lot, or store them for a few days when I tear into the print head area which requires a major tear-down.
...
SG

How long could the ink be stored inside the (closed) zip-bags, only a few day's or a few weeks/month's?

[Dale_Cotton2]

When I talked to an Epson technician about it, he told me that the "expiration date" is just a general recommendation, and that in their lab, they use cartridges that are several years out of date all the time, and have never seen a problem.

That's an OMG + LOL if I've ever heard one!

(Not that they're necessarily ink experts.)

[Conner999]

Print on occasion, clean the head-wiping 'rubber strips' near the capping/rest pad station - and rest area/pad itself. Do a Google - easy to clean, take no time and gets an amazing amount of gunk out - dried nk, animal hair, etc. The latter keeps the seal around the head tight when at rest and cleans the head off better vs. wiping strips that are dirty. 

My 3800 is 4-5 years old, is rarely turned off, is used infrequently and last (very rare) time I had a clog and random ink drops on paper, a station cleaning fixed it in 30 mins.

[Some Guy]

I was reading on Lyson Inks website about some idea of theirs to leave a small Xmas tree light timer plugged into your printer while away.  Have it set to go on for 15 minutes a day and leave the printer powered ON and plugged into it.  Idea was that the printer would power on, do a minor head sweep and a bit of ink tank pumping up and minor head cleaning, then park itself for a while in waiting, and the timer would shut off for the next 24 hour cycle and it would repeat.

Sounds interesting. 

SG

[stockjock]

You can automate the process of occaisionally printing on the Epson 3880 by using Photoshop to create an Action to load and print an image and then a Droplet to create an .EXE file from the action and then use the Droplet in conjuction with the Windows Task Scheduler to automatically print an image ever few days or once a week.  The two key tricks are to fully specify all the printing parameters when you create the action.  And then make sure there is a JPEG image associated with the Droplet in the Windows Task Scheduler otherwise it won't run.  The process is hard to describe but fairly easy to do.  Just load some plain paper in the feeder. That should keep the printer clog free.  Qimage is supposed to have a similar capability.

[alain]

...  Qimage is supposed to have a similar capability.

Indeed, with Qimage you can now shedule the print of a specific patern to avoid clogging.

[Jeff-Grant]

I was reading on Lyson Inks website about some idea of theirs to leave a small Xmas tree light timer plugged into your printer while away.  Have it set to go on for 15 minutes a day and leave the printer powered ON and plugged into it.  Idea was that the printer would power on, do a minor head sweep and a bit of ink tank pumping up and minor head cleaning, then park itself for a while in waiting, and the timer would shut off for the next 24 hour cycle and it would repeat.

Sounds interesting. 

SG

Only problem with that is that the 3880 has a soft power switch. You can't turn it on and off with a timer.

[howardm]

You can automate the process of occaisionally printing on the Epson 3880 by using Photoshop to create an Action to load and print an image and then a Droplet to create an .EXE file from the action and then use the Droplet in conjuction with the Windows Task Scheduler to automatically print an image ever few days or once a week.  The two key tricks are to fully specify all the printing parameters when you create the action.  And then make sure there is a JPEG image associated with the Droplet in the Windows Task Scheduler otherwise it won't run.  The process is hard to describe but fairly easy to do.  Just load some plain paper in the feeder. That should keep the printer clog free.  Qimage is supposed to have a similar capability.

I'm not actually convinced you need to make a droplet.  most OS's have a built-in 'print' function (ala 'lp/lpr' in Unix/OSX or god-knows what in Windows) so that all you have to do is have a .jpg ready to go and via the OS's scheduler (ie. 'cron'), send it to the printer on whatever schedule you want.

[Some Guy]

Only problem with that is that the 3880 has a soft power switch. You can't turn it on and off with a timer.

I have two 3880's and they act differently.

The older one has a switch in that once pressed it stays on forever.  The other has some sort of switch where it shuts down by itself after maybe 8 hours, while the first one stays on indefinitely until I hit the switch again.

For play, I have both of them plugged into a power strip.  Turned them both on which did their cycle up thing as normal, and left them both on until the LCD backlight went off in maybe 15-30 minutes.

I turned the switch off at the power strip and then back on.  The 3880 that won't shut off unless I push the button again powered up and did the normal startup cycling bit.  A timer would work with that one.

The other one remained off on flipping the power strip switch on so it wouldn't work with it.

Don't know why they operate differently out of the box other than maybe a year between them and Epson maybe did some firmware mod to them.  Maybe the "always on" action is buried in the LCD menu on the printer someplace?  I would imagine all the older 3800's would work via the timer idea too - maybe.

SG

[howardm]

Epson did upgrade the firmware in the last year or 2 of production to add that auto-shutoff timer.  The printer should have come w/ a piece of paper describing it's operation and how to change it (or turn the timer off fully) (I think it's whatever power-up button hold that is needed to change language and/or units of measure etc etc).

If you do a nozzle check on both printers, you'll find the firmware version #'s to be different.