HThis is not out of the rubber port. Clearly the ink has escaped all withing the cartridge.
this really isn't clear until you've opened the cartridge up, but it's also not all that important. In thinking about this more overnight, you could be having an issue with the LM damper-- there might be some kind of starvation happening because of dried ink in the damper that is causing bubbles-- there really are so many potential issues, but you're not gonna be able to drill down to them unless you try out the steps that I've given you earlier and pinpoint the issue.
I personally hate to think of these machines as consumable products, which is why I've spent so much of the last 15 years of my life tearing them down and rebuilding them. Peizoelectric heads like those used by Epson and most of the rest of the printing industry (except for the notable exceptions of Canon and HP) require levels of maintenance that simply can't be done automatically-- they really do require manual removal and cleaning and purging to stay in good shape over long periods of time, and they most certainly ARE consumables. Epson seems to finally have acknowledged this in it's industrial level printers but creating methods for the user to be able to replace the heads, but they still sell their fine-art printers at a much lower price and expect the entire unit to be replaced when theres a single problematic nozzle. It really sucks as a business model for someone who understands basic mechanical appliances, and I've done my damndest to learn as much as I can about how their systems work, and I've replaced the heads/dampers/capping stations, main boards, and just about everything else possible in these machines in my time with them.
I wouldn't be able to operate properly at this stage in my printing life without a RIP that allows disabling/remapping of a channel. Unfortunately there aren't many of them that can do this, and they can be expensive. Almost all of them can turn off a single color and reprofile without it. It's when you get into the issues of needing to swap one color with another that most of them start to balk. Ergosoft is great for this purpose-- Onyx can do it, Flexi can do it, Caldera, and Colorgate (to a degree) but the only RIP I'd really recommend to anybody who isn't an absolute professional or at least a completely obsessed nerd would be Mirage, and last time I checked I don't think you can swap channels.
Anyway, rant aside, I would stop doing cleanings. You need to figure out where the issue is, and these cleanings are doing nothing but potentially exacerbating it. If you indeed have some dried ink in the LM damper or ink system leading to the head you're not gonna be able to push it thru those tiny nozzles to clear it if it was strong enough to cause the ink to blow back out of the port into your cartridge (which is what I think happened, I dont think the cart itself leaked, but no way to know for sure without opening it. You CAN put it back together if that's what you're worried about.
By the way, I'm not even sure what CL1 CL2 correspond to these days, I would assume that they are just more passes of the wiper.
Basic theory of operation is this:
Regular cleanings are a process in which the head uses the piezo elements to fire a bunch of ink into the waste ink pad, and then the wiper physically wipes across the surface trying to clean off any excess ink on the face of the nozzle. This is in theory useful for ink that could be dried up on the nozzle plate surface, but as it actually
fires the nozzles there is a chance that you could cause more damage to the head if there's a really bad clog in a specific spot, because the peizo crystals in the nozzles that are responsible use the ink as coolant, and if there is no ink flow to that particular nozzle, it could burn out.
Power cleanings on the other hand, position the head over the sealed portion of the cap (in the 9890/9900 there is only a single width cap, so it can only do 1 pair of channels at a time, hence why it takes so long. Other printers, and the older 11880 would seal the entire head and do all nozzles at once) This procedure builds up negative pressure using the pump inside the capping station, then releases a stopper valve which causes it to PULL ink through the head-- therefore not firing the nozzles at all. This can be a much safer option to clear certain types of clogs as it requires no nozzle firing, and therefore no strain on the head itself. It uses quite a bit more ink, but it also can actually force through stubborn particles without having to actually "shoot" them out of the nozzles. If you're going to continue cleaning, I would only use this type on that channel right now, but I still think you should try my troubleshooting steps and post pictures back first so we can evaluate further.
