Occasionally you may need to remove the printhead to clean the nozzles. Use the instructions in the video below. You may open and close the lid up to 8 times before the print head will lose its prime and need to be replaced. Each time you open the lid, air is introduced into the system and transferred inside the printhead. The print head has 17 ml of space and initially carries 3ml of air. You may open the lid 8 times before there is not enough space for ink and the print head loses its prime.
As long as the system is sealed, the ink leaving the cartridge while printing will be filled by the air from the tubing until the ink fills the tubing. The ink will then come into the top of the cartridge and migrate down to the bottom. The tubing has about 1.5ml of volume to fill, and there is 14ml of ink in the cartridge initially.
Because there is over 10x the amount of ink in cartridge vs. tubing, you can open the lid 8 times, and it will still reprime the tubing. After that, you will have to purchase a new print head.
Keep the LX3000/LX4000 powered on.
To keep the printhead ready for printing, do not remove it from the printer and keep the printer powered on. The LX3000 will occasionally clean the nozzles but only if it remains powered on. This will minimize the need for the manual cleaning described below
- Dye Print Head
- Pigment Print Head