Following my rant(s), I sent my second e-mail to Epson. In short I explained that the failure of my printer, and my ongoing angst, was going to make a catastrophic difference to Epson—world wide. I forgot about it for a few hours, then started to eye up the nice looking piece of kit in the corner of my office. It really is a superb piece of design work and my time in the industry lets me know that the general mechanics are good. Pity the bleedin thing don't print.
Nothing to loose......so, time to try to resolve the issue with some DIY.
First time it took me about ten mins to take the head cluster out. ( 40 secs the next time )
I happened to have some sleeving--that I had pulled off some house wiring--that just fitted the input nozzles. This just happened to fit into a length of clear plastic pipe from the car squirters
Half a dozen bottles of fluid were taken from the household cupboard, and it turned out that Windex dissolves the ink better than...well, most ink dissolvers. It also has some soap in it which the real stuff does as well.
I split the head and cleaned the ducts to the head separately, now time for the actual head.
Blowing Windex into the assembled head caused bubbles–in neat lines–to form on the head surface. All the clours came through except one...and it was just as I was blowing extra hard on this one than an e-male came in from Epson.
"If you would like to take your printer out of the trash, and ring this number, we will see what we can do." (Really!!)
Huh????? I had let them know of all the people that had dumped their printers when they were only one minute old, so they were obviously very, very worried.
"We will pick it up. We will give you a new one if this don't go."
Huh????? I'm dreaming, right? "You know that it's over a year old?"
"That's okay."
I looked frantically in the cupboard for some Windex remover, wiped my finger prints off everything and packaged the unit. I wait by the door, but expect to wake up any second. Can this be real?
To occupy my time I chatted to a really nice guy on one of your links. He has been selling the goop and clone (chipped ) cartridges for several years. The same stuff does for all colours and will do several sessions. And for example. A $34 B&Wt comes out at under 8 bucks.
http://www.maxpatchink.com/epson.shtml#I 1 888 231 3426 I hope I won't need him for a while.