My awesome evening of printing

[neile]

I figure everyone here will appreciate how my evening of printing went.

Did a print off my ipf5100 and it had HORRIBLE banding. Ran a nozzle check and sure enough one entire section was faded. Did a cleaning and attempted to run a second nozzle check only to be told to check the left print head. Doh.

Ok, no problem. Do the prints on the 8300. Roll over to the 8300 and... banding. Whaaa? Ok, fine, do a feed adjustment. Banding solved. But every single print comes out with the same scratch marks described in a prior thread. Tried both Canson Infinity Baryta Photographique and Ilford Galerie Gold Fibre Silk with no luck at all. No amount of adjustments will get rid of them. It doesn't help that the print is almost entirely pitch black so any little mark shows through brilliantly. Why tonight of all nights do they show up when I've never had trouble with this before? Sigh.

So instead of having two beautiful prints done with the whack of a print button I'm knee deep in 10" long pieces of wasted paper and out a print head.

Good times. Good times.

Neil

[hugowolf]

I have found a decent single malt Scotch to be a cure for the side effects of this. Unfortunately the treatment wears off after a while and continuous application is required, which is both expensive and addictive.

[neile]

Hugowolf, that did make me smile on a pretty sad evening. Thank you

Neil

[Josh-H]

I have found a decent single malt Scotch to be a cure for the side effects of this. Unfortunately the treatment wears off after a while and continuous application is required, which is both expensive and addictive.

+1 

[kaelaria]

Been there, done that man...I used to DREAD the orders for the mostly black prints!!  Of course they were the popular ones too

[jferrari]

Reminds of this poignant fable:

"If you hate someone, give them a large format printer. If you REALLY REALLY REALLY hate them, give them two."

[neile]

HA!

Neil

[bill t.]

When I got my 7800 I was getting some pretty bad running scratches on dark areas with Silver Rag.  I was still young and brash then, so I advanced several sheets of 500 grit emery sandpaper through the media path centered on the problem area.  Problem fixed!

Then later I had intermittent scratches on another super stiff media.  Turned out the roll was unwinding from its own springiness and sometimes contacting a burr on the plastic cover.  There's always something.

And then another time with the 8300 I got a roll of canvas that was attached to the core with a bead of gummy stuff, which stuck to the canvas at the end of the roll and contaminated the entire media path including the rollers.  That took a while to rectify.  Never beta test media.

[neile]

Bill, tell me more about this emery magic you performed!

Neil

[Some Guy]

When I got my 7800 I was getting some pretty bad running scratches on dark areas with Silver Rag.  I was still young and brash then, so I advanced several sheets of 500 grit emery sandpaper through the media path centered on the problem area.  Problem fixed!

Then later I had intermittent scratches on another super stiff media.  Turned out the roll was unwinding from its own springiness and sometimes contacting a burr on the plastic cover.  There's always something.

And then another time with the 8300 I got a roll of canvas that was attached to the core with a bead of gummy stuff, which stuck to the canvas at the end of the roll and contaminated the entire media path including the rollers.  That took a while to rectify.  Never beta test media.

I too would be interested in the "emery magic" method.

I have a 3880 and on ejecting, it will sometimes leave skid marks off the rollers at one certain spot in all prints.  I suspect it is the same roller doing it.  I've set the platen to Widest and still will get it on smooth-surfaced papers at times.  Someone said to set the paper length 4" longer so maybe the roller will skid at a place not on the image itself.

I did have a roll of cut canvas that gave me fits trying to get loaded square without a "Load Error" message.  I tried that "Put a taped leader on it" suggestion.  Well, the tape broke loose and wrapped itself up on the rollers which required a dismantling to get it all out of there and all the gum off the rollers.  I should have smoothed - or roughed? - the rollers up then.

SG

[bill t.]

The "emery" thing was a few years ago, so I'm little hazy on the details.  It wasn't emery cloth, but rather black silicon carbide sandpaper which looks the same.  I've got a collection of SIC papers between 2000 and 600 grit in my big dusty plastic box labeled MISC PRINTER STUFF so that must be what I used.  I found the location of the suspected scratch demon by holding up the scratched media to the feed.  Then I ran a super fine grit paper through that path.  Eureka!  A faint swipe of light colored dust at the suspected spot.  I felt so vindicated!  Then I ran a coarser grit a few times until there was no more swipe.  Maybe it was significant the the SIC paper was a little thicker than the luster media I was using at the time.  Never had a scratch on anything again.  The 7800 is friendly to running the sheets through this way, I'm not sure you could do this on the 8300 because you just can't get close enough to the feed.

But look fellas, this is the stuff of desperate fools!  Go easy.  I still wonder if there was just a piece of crud in there rather than a burr on the actual parts.  Next time I will spend a little more time looking for fallen-in crud before assuming a burr.  And needless to say, the printing head doesn't ever want to cross over that sandpaper, which would probably nullify your warranty and confirm the printer industry's worst suspicions about its customers.

I'm pretty sure I made a many years old post here about this, but darned if I could find it just now.

EDIT:

This is my old post to the Epson Wide Format Forum in 2007.  This applies to the 7800.  How easily one forgets little details.  Note the printer was OFF for this method.

I think I killed the scratch. In a crazed mood I bought a few sheets
GatorGrit, SuperFine 600B Emery sandpaper at Lowes. With the printer
off, I opened up the front cover, released the roller lever, and
stuck a sheet of sandpaper in from the normal paper exit position up
under the grey plastic rollers, and about 3" further. The grit side
was out, just like the printing surface. Then I daintily released
the lever until the roller barely grabbed the sandpaper, just to the
point where I could barely pull the sandpaper out. Low and behold,
there was a residue mark on the sandpaper exactly in the position of
the scratch. Awright! I repeated this two more times, on the final
try there was no residue, so I quit. Probably a plastic burr on the
back of the black supports for the rollers.

I'm now halfway through my third 24x60, not a scratch in sight!

To be honest, this probably was a little rash, if any of you are
thinking of trying this, please email me first when a little more
paper has been printed. My apologies to any aspersions cast on
Silver Rag, and this was my first real issue with the 7800 (and of
course there were no problems when using genuine Epson papers!).

[neile]

To be honest, this is in line with what I was contemplating. I figure it's the edge of the rollers that's leaving the mark, so if they were sanded down ever so slightly that might resolve my problem. I wasn't sure how to actually do the sanding though. Running a single sheet of fine grit sandpaper ever so slightly back and forth through the rollers seems like a brilliant idea.

Of course the only problem is how I'll know it worked. All of my rolls of paper have gone through the printer enough times by now to have tons of little scratches on them, so until I can get to pristine parts of the roll, I'll never know.

Gotta go to Home Depot today for something else anyway. I think I'll get some sandpaper

Neil