By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Gripes moans and whinges on April 3, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Darn it and @$%&£! Why didn’t we stop when it was ‘nearly there’? Sigh!
Now, instead of an inkjet printer that used to work fine until a page needed cyan, we have a plastic box which blinks once when plugged in and then plays dead. Worse still, we nearly got cyan to print properly and it was only the “one more try” that did it.
After reading various suggestions on the Net to unblock Canon inkjet heads, we took it out and soaked it in a little vinegar-based window cleaner. It seemed to work too, cyan printed far better than it had for months but there were still discernible lines running through blue solids. Which is more than can be said for our multi-coloured stained fingers.
At this point we hedged our bets and investigated buying a new print head compared with a new printer. The replacement part will be over £70 plus another £30 for incredibly expensive pieces of foam, while a new Canon Pixma 4600 is around £80. It seemed a good time to try one more thing we read on-line: dismantling the print head altogether by removing two screws and levering up a little ceramic plate. We (the Royal We that is) tried this but chickened-out when the plate wouldn’t lift up. We/I reassembled the print head, ink cartridges popped into place and the printer powered up.
The carriage slid along but then nothing. No lights, no noise, nothing. The fuse hadn’t blown and power cable securely in place. Nothing obvious had broken or got flooded but on reconnecting the power, one lamp blinked then stayed off. And that’s the current (or lack of) situation.
Luckily we have old Grumble Guts, a 15-year old Apple LaserWriter 8500 who sits in the corner gathering dust most of the time. Spare parts are as rare as rocking horse dung and toner cartridges cost as much as a banker’s pension but it’s a network printer which we can control via Telnet and Apple still supports with drivers.
Meanwhile, yet another inkjet printer seems destined for ditching because of some piddling fault which is more expensive to fix than buying a new machine.
Crazy!
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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