Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Homebrew PCBs

And watch out around plastics. Some varieties of alcohol will dissolve
many kinds of plastic.

If your cartridges are bought empty, no need to clean any old ink out.

If you are attempting to use an old used cartridge, keep in mind that
the inks are water soluble. I've had problems with alcohol drying
-too- quickly and leaving behind a mess. I'm cleaning some old
cartridges. I started with 99% isopropyl, soaking in a glass and
changing the alcohol several times, and started pouring in distilled
water. I found that although the alcohol had begun to run clear, the
distilled water dissolved more ink that the alcohol had not touched.

I have a Canon BJC 4000 with a straight paper path and a separate cart
for black, and several HP 310, 320, and 330 laptop inkjets with
straight paper paths and all black cartridges.

If you are using a color printer, make sure and set the printer driver
to print greyscale. Otherwise it may try and use the other colors
around the edges.

Oh, yeah... DON'T USE PAINT PIGMENTS! Paint pigments are just that,
pigments. They are little flakes of color and will clog your cartridge
right up.

Keep in mind that you don't need to see opaque black. Just enough
color to tell where it printed is all you need. You need a dye, not a
pigment. RIT fabrid dye has a lot of salt in it so I would not use it.
I wonder if food coloring would work?

Steve Greenfield