Some time ago, I bought a "new" printer, an Epson pro 4000.
Didn't cost me very much, mostly because one ink channel seemed to be blocked. When I picked it up I could see the printer working, but it was visible that the cyan ink wasn't working.
Today I finally got round to cleaning the printer head of my epson 4000 pro printer. In the end it wasn't all too difficult, using the instructions I managed to find on the internet. During the cleaning I let the head rest on a layer of kitchen paper that was soaked in isopropyl alcohol. This drew out all the colours (capilar effect) from the head. From the residue this left on the paper, it could be seen each ink colour was being used.
Afterwards I decided to do some nozzle checks. The printer prints several checks on a page. Honestly I am not sure how many it would print as after 4 prints one cartridge was completely empty (the magenta one). However, during the first run I had troubles with all colours, but mostly the light cyan. The second run went a lot better for most colours, but to my surprise it wasn't the light cyan, but the dark cyan that was not performing. The other colours seemed to improve a lot on the next 2 runs, but the cark cyan refused to spit anything out.
Can anyone tell me what this can be caused by? I don't believe the head is blocked up. That doesn't make much sense, since all other colours seem to improve with each run. And on the first run I did manage to use the dark cyan. Also each colour was present when I was cleaning it (the capilar effect proved this). During the cleaning session, I also made sure to use a syringe to draw out any air in the tubes.
Does this printer use a pump for each colour? If so, is it possible that the pump for the dark cyan isn't working? Or is it possible that for some reason the cartridge for the dark cyan is creating a vacuum, drawing the ink away from the head? Or maybe the air vent of the dark cyan is blocked somehow? (Does anyone know how the cartridges work for the pro 4000?) I notice when I disconnected the dark cyan from above the head, the ink immediately drew back. Note that I did not close the ink valves when I did this last exercise (I did close them during the cleaning process though)
Any ideas?
