Resurrected my old inkjet printer!
A few days ago, I mentioned that I cleaned up my Samsung laser printer's rubber uptake roller with a bit of belt conditioner spray on a Q-tip. That is working great.
Fixing the laser printer encouraged me to try to fix my old Brother MFC-J430W all-in-one inkjet printer/scanner/copier/fax. I had not used that printer for a long time and the printhead jets were dried up and clogged. I mainly have been using it as a scanner for the past ~4 years. It still worked great for that.
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Well, I did a test print page, and it came out blank. I tried the printer's cleaning cycles, but nothing worked. Completely blank sheets of paper came out. I thought it was dead as a printer.
I was looking online for a new color inkjet or color laser printer and they cost hundreds of dollars. For as little as I print out these days, that was not something I wanted to invest in. So, I decided to watch some YouTube videos on how to clean out the dried ink in my printhead. I found a couple showing how to hook up a syringe to the ink jet ports where the cartridges go into the bay, and to force some cleaning fluid through the lines. I mixed up some Isopropyl Alcohol and water as my cleaning solution. I had a syringe and some tubing to hook up to the ink port. I flushed out the lines and hoped for the best.
I put in the ink cartridges and the test print page was perfect! Here is a sample of my color test page....
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Well, I don't know why this uploaded picture is not as good as the scanned .jpg image, but let me say that in real life, you can see all the colors down to 20% on the printout. Bottom line, the printer is working as good as new thanks to YouTube University and a few supplies I already had on hand.
Did you know that many of the new printers have chips in the ink cartridges so that you can only use that printer's OEM ink cartridges? If you try to put in a third-party ink cartridge, your printer could shut itself down! What a rip off. In any case, my old inkjet printer does not have that problem. I can buy third party color ink cartridges for my printer.
The savings in ink alone was well worth attempting to clean out my old printer. A set of OEM Brother 4 ink cartridges is about $50.00 for a set - or almost $12.50 per ink cartridge. I can get new ink cartridges from Amazon from a third party in a 15-cartridge set for $23.00 - or about $1.60 per ink cartridge. I don't print much anymore these days, but if you did print a lot, that ink cost would add up fast if you had to buy only OEM ink.
In my case, I need to remember to print out at least one page per week to keep the printhead from drying up again. Better to keep it running right than having to hope you can fix it later. Anyways, I got my color printer back in action after about 3 or 4 years of not being able to use it as a printer.
