I put the thing together today, the printer works fine now, currently
fiddling with the settings.
Etched a test PCB early on, but could already see there were problems on
the printout.
Some nozzles were not firing, i can see breaks where they where. Also i
had some significant puddling of ink on the ground area.
I've cleaned the head, all nozzles are firing properly now, but i'm still
struggling with the puddling.
Tried all 15 possible combinations of paper type and print quality, while
the results seem to vary there's some puddling on every setting.
The brightness/contrast settings do not seem to work to adjust the ink
amount. No change between 0 and +2, and over that there is no ink at all.
Maybe i would need to use a grey image or something instead of black.
The puddling may not be a problem for my normal PCBs, i made kind of a
challenging test pattern. The larger structures of the main text came out
well.
Well, some more tinkering needed to get it just right. But i could do a
PCB with it right now, and i'm sure after fine-tuning it will be much
better than the best toner transfer.
Also, a lot of work is needed on the curing issue. I think i can use that
old clothes iron upside down for that. I have calibrated the dial in
degrees some time ago. my gut feeling is the curing is only about driving
all the water out and not very critical, but i guess that is to be seen. I
expect tests with a few different temperatures and curing times are
required.
Oh, one more thing, the transparency setting does not use any black cart
ink at all. Only color ink. Some of the pther paper settings have a black
ink only option.
Chris, about the paper sensor: I think i know how you can fix that, it got
into the same situation.
My solution is to mount the paper sensor so it will "see" the carrier
plate directly by mounting it so the edge passes through. But the printer
expects a certain time delay from when it starts eating paper to when the
sensor should see it. So i cut out a notch from the side of the carrier
that will alow about 6cm of feed before the sensor is activated. The
procedure is to put the leading edge of the carrier into the printer
manually so the feed roller grabs it, before you send the print command.
I experimented for the ideal distance between sensor and the end of the
notch, and found the printer is quite tolerant (maybe from 2cm to 10cm or
so will work. Simply stick some tape to the side of a sheet and manually
feed it varying distances before starting the printing process.
ST
On Fri, 07 Jul 2006 23:45:30 +0200, lcdpublishing
<
lcdpublishing@...> wrote:
> Good luck Stefan!!!
> Please post some photos of your progress and achievments. I have
> out-of-town guests in for the weekend so my ink-jet nightmare will
> be on hold for another couple weeks or so.
> I am still upset about that jam-up - dumb,dumb,dumb.