INKJET PRINTER ROLLER AND PLATE CLEANING
COMPLAINT |
Printouts are dirty, or show traces of ink in thin lines or patches, either randomly, or horizontally or vertically.
or
Printer “chews” the sheets, or sheets get stuck.
|
PROBLEM |
The printer’s rollers and/or plates may be dirty.
|
SOLUTION |
Clean the printer’s rollers and plates.
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If the printouts are dirty or show traces of ink either thin lines or just dirty patches on some parts of the sheet either horizontally or vertically, this could be as a result of the printer’s rollers and plates that are dirty and need to be cleaned. All printers provide a maintenance feature in their menu for cleaning these parts (similar to how they allow you to do a print head cleaning from the maintenance menu in order to clean print-heads if they are clogged).
Above left: example of what some of the printer rollers look like and each printer has a minimum of 2 sets of them in order to drive the paper to the print head.
Above right: A typical printer’s menu in the maintenance tab (on different printers, this menu may look slightly different, but the concept is the same)
On the above 2 photos you can see examples of dirty prints or lines on the page caused by dirty rollers that need cleaning.
Please note:
- Rollers are situated in different places according to printer make and model. Certain printers will ask you to choose what you want to clean. Normally they will ask you if you want to clean the rollers and also if you want to clean the top plate or the bottom plate. We always suggest to the customer that they go through cleaning all parts of the printer that it gives us the option to clean by following the instructions step by step.
- Very importantly we should recommend to the customer that they should buy a set of cleaning carttridges which will do a better and thorough cleaning of these parts.
- Cleaning of Rollers and plates however can be done by using the normal ink cartridges but they will need to do more cleaning cycles to achieve the result and will waste some ink.
- The specialty cleaning futures on the printers were put there by the manufacturer because they are absolutely necessary to do some cleaning without having to be an expert and dismantle the printer in order to clean everything manually.
- You should use these cleaning functions frequently if you want to have perfect prints and a trouble free printer for a long long time.