... is the printer now junk?
Not necessarily. Have you tried what's commonly called "the Windex treatment"?
Windex is a liquid North American residential window cleaner. Whatever you have in your market should suffice.
Tear a paper towel in to a six inch square and fold it to that it's six inches long by in inch wide. It's now several layers thick. Soak an inch-long portion of the center of this strip with window cleaner, say a half teaspoon's worth.
Now comes the hard part. Increasing your printer's platen distance first might make this easier. Consult your manual on how to accommodate thicker papers. You want to get the window-cleaner-soaked pad into the printer, underneath the print head, exactly where the paper would be during printing. This means pulling the plug on the printer when the carriage is mid way across its travel, say during head cleaning, cart changing or while printing. When you do this, the print head should be free and you can slide it *gently* back and forth. Put the paper towel pad into the printer and slide the head over it. Now you have a pad soaked in window cleaner in direct contact with the print head.
Leave it there overnight. In the morning, soak the areas of the towel near the print head again with window cleaner. The goal here is to get lots of window cleaner on to the towel and
into the print head. If it's a squirt bottle, this is fairly easy. Just don't soak the insides of the printer.
After about 24 hours or so of soaking, withdraw the pad and try the printer. It'll take a few cleaning cycles to restore operation, but, if you're lucky, the nozzles will unclog. If you take your printer to Epson, this is basically what they do, only they claim to have a special head cleaning solution.
Good luck. And print more!
