Hi folks,
I'm new here, although I've been lurking for a long time. You can see my intro post in the general topic. Okay, enough chatter. I got a brand new CISS from www.macroenter.com yesterday, as reccomended by Denny in a post somewhere, and installed it today. I was hoping it would save me lots of money printing my WWG stuff and the various PDF gaming manuals that I have. However, I can't get the thing to work properly, not matter what I do to it I have an Epson NX400 printer. Basically, the issue is that the magenta and yellow colors won't come through and print onto the page. I've run multiple cleaning cycles on the print heads, to no avail, and even taken out the CISS cartridges and jiggled them around before putting them back in. Nothing seems to work. Is there anybody here that might be able to suggest something that would fix this so I can get back to making terrain? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Matthew777

The standard It's-Not-My-Fault-If-It-Messes-Up-Your-Machine statement applies. Use the following at your own discretion.

Here are a couple of things that might help you with your Epson printer. I do not know if they are specifically for the cartridges and inks from the site. It looks like they would work with an Epson printer.

Use this document to set up some printer profiles:

Scroll down to dowload the howtotest.pdf

This document has some color charts for testing and cleaning your print heads.

Scroll down to download the IJC_Support.pdf
Use the Purge4 page to check all four then the Purge Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, or Black pages for specific problems.

I use the refillable cartrides and inks from that website and have had no problems so far. The printer profiles and purge pages seem to work with my Epson NX515. The purge pages are supposed to use 1/30th of the ink that the Epson cleaning routine uses.

Try them out to see if maybe you can purge the air out of the lines if that is the problem.

thanks, DougT, I'll give that a shot. I'll keep you posted on how it goes

Yeah, that's a tough one to diagnose. I had pretty good luck with my old CISS (before I moved to laser prints) although it did plug up on occasion. I had to run a ton of cleaning cycles when it did (I think my record was 20 cycles). But that was pretty intermittent. You may have to clean your heads manually but I'm not sure where to find good tutorials on that.

CISS does save you substantial money but it can be messy and it can occasionally plug up on you. Laser is expensive but you get high yields for heavy printing and its clean/easy to operate.

Still fighting with it... The support guy I've been emailing has, so far, been almost useless. I'm beginning to think I should have just continued to buy the expensive epson cartridges and save all the fuss and hassle. DougT, thanks for the link to the test sheets - they have proved quite useful.

Could you explain what you mean by "bleed the lines"? I did a qucik google search for "bleeding cis lines" and didn't find anything.
Thx,
Matthew

Yes, I mean use a syringe to either (a) force ink through the line, pushing the air bubbles out the other end, or (b) suck ink through the line, pulling the air bubbles out.

Basically, you have to get the air bubbles out of the line, since they're blocking the printing.

Here is an example using a "Pianobook" CIS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqIdYn3S ... r_embedded

You would need to google the instructions for doing the same thing for your model of CIS.

Yeah, I kinda already tried that, but thanks anyway sunraven. I'm not sure what's wrong, but I'm getting kinda tempted to just send the thing back. Seems like it might not be worth the trouble. I'll try calling the support line on Monday, and then if they can't fix the problem, I think I'll ship it back. Might try refillable cartridges, seems like folks have better luck with them.