Overspray/Blobbing of Ink

Symptoms:

• My printer puts dots of unwanted ink on the paper.
• My printer spits blobs of ink onto the paper during printing.
• I get extra ink on the edges of my paper.
• I have ink on my rollers and it makes marks on the prints.

Solution:
We have designed a siphon break into the PermaFlow System. Without a siphon break, the ink can start to flow from the bottles into the printer on its own, making a huge mess. Our filling technique leaves about 5% of the cartridge volume empty. This empty space is an air pocket at the top of the cartridge. When ink comes in from the supply tubes, it drips on the sponge and becomes available to the print head. Without the siphon break, the cartridge would be 100% filled and a solid column of ink would exist between the bottles and the print head. When the printer starts to print, it is like sucking on a tube to start a siphon. Once the siphon starts, the ink will flow on its own, by gravity. Our filling method prevents this.
If my printer is overspraying or blobbing ink, how do I stop it?
If your printer is with a PermaFlow installed and spits out small blobs of ink onto the paper, this is caused by not having a siphon break at the top of the cartridge. The siphon break can be re-established and the spitting will stop.

• Remove the appropriate ink tube from its bottle, resting above the bottle level and lay on some tissue.
• Remove the appropriate cartridge from the printer, invert and insert the 10ml syringe with winged nozzle attached proceed to pull. You will collect some ink from the cartridge but the main aim is to fill the tube with about two thirds of its length with air!
• The ink in the syringe can be expelled back into the correct bottle for re-use.
• Re-insert the tube into the bottle and proceed to do either purge pages from our CD of that particular colour or simply head clean and nozzle check in batches of 3 head cleans as recommended.
• Clean up your printer so there is no ink on the rollers or elsewhere. The spitting problem should be solved.

If you have a lot of ink in your printer and on the rollers, try this. Get a clean sheet of paper and soak it with rubbing alcohol. Manually feed it into the printer by pushing the paper feed button. Do this several times (10 or more). The alcohol will mix with the ink and dry it, and it will also clean up the rubber grippers and rollers. Try using the PermaJet Rec-Tac spray to clean the fibres within the printer rollers.