Hello Deanwork,
Thank you for your excellent suggestion about the Wide Format group, which I will follow up for sure. I have always been grateful for and admired your contributions to LuLa. I myself sometimes feel very frustrated with EPSON. I was just in my clumsy way trying to ensure that the discussion here didn't descend into an unproductive flamewar ("PC versus MAC" style).
This may be a good time to try to summarize my understanding of where we are so far. The discussions have been about finding answers to the following three questions:
1. What is the proper procedure to change the wiper blade / wiper assembly of a SureColor P7000 or P9000?
What is certain is that it cannot be exactly like the methodology for older generations of printer, such as the x900, since the Service Mode is missing the Wiper Exchange feature.
So far, we have received several possibilities, but all of them can apparently result in some heart-stopping moments and/or printer messages. This leads me to think that there must be an official methodology, documented in a yet-to-be revealed service manual for the service techs. Thus far I don't believe we have seen this.
2. Where can we get replacement wiper blades / wiper assemblies for a SureColor P7000 or P9000?
a. So far, we have heard that the older wiper assembly for older printer series such as the 9900 will probably work in the P9000. However, these older wiper assemblies do not have the same wiper blade as the P9000, and it would probably be preferable to use the official P9000 wiper blade.
b. No one has yet identified a source for the SureColor P7000 or P9000 wiper blades / assemblies.
3. What is the official list of maintenance schedules for the various components in a P7000 / P9000?
So far we have heard various opinions, but I am not aware of any definitive list. In short, I don't believe we have seen the pages from the yet-to-be-revealed Epson maintenance manuals for the P7000 / P9000. While better than nothing, opinions without this sort of official corroboration may be faulty; many of us tend to remember how things were for our older generation machines and forget that they may be different for these new machines. Without such a list, we cannot properly schedule maintenance, regardless of whether we plan to do it ourselves or have EPSON do it for us.
Anyway, that's where I think we are at this time. There are other things I would very much like to know, of course, but this list is a concrete and useful start.
Thanks again to everyone for their help. I hope it will benefit everyone, including EPSON (having their printers well maintained has to be good for them).