Homebrew PCBs

> 
> I don't know for sure how much ink it uses to clean the heads 
>relative 
> to how much it uses printing (may depend on how much ink is used per 
> page), but it sure wastes a large volume of ink.  My Epson has a 
>small 
> peristaltic pump below the cleaning sponge that delivers the ink 
>used in 
> cleaning into a receptacle at the bottom of the printer.  The 
>printer 
> died young after consuming less than 10 ink refills and upon 
>disassembly 
> for salvage I found that the receptacle had quite a large quantity 
>of 
> gooey black ink in it.  Easily 8cc's in total.  Given that this was 
> mostly-dehydrated and tar-like in consistency, I hate to think what 
> percentage of the original liquid ink ended up down there.
> 
> Dave K

Ten refills isn't bad, my Epson R340 died in 3 months and I hadn't 
even finished the original set of cartridges. I /finally/ got the 
thing replaced this week (if it breaks again I'm going to use a 
sledgehammer on it and buy a Canon which I can modify to do CD 
printing). 

Off-topic but very useful information if you already own one of these 
printers: If you have an Epson R-series printer, there's a trap-door 
on the back held on by a single screw. You should open this, and find 
the clear vinyl tube that routes the waste ink to the base of the 
printer. It's got a green stripe on it. The loose end will be pointing 
towards the middle of the printer - be careful not to pull the other 
end off the print-head assembly - point it out the back of the 
printer, and put a cup or something underneath it. There is a program 
called the SSC Service Utility that will allow you to reset the waste 
ink tank counter, which you should do monthly, which will prevent the 
printer from 'shutting down' and requiring an Epson tech to unlock it.

More info can be found here.

http://www.stevesforums.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=51595&forum_id=40

The initial head priming of the replacement R340 took 10 ml of ink - 
that's nearly an /entire/ cartridge worth of ink. This is necessary, 
however, to purge the 'blank' fluid that keeps the printhead from 
drying out while it's in storage. To avoid it cleaning the head all 
the time, you need to leave the printer on unless you are not going to 
use it for an extended period of time. It does a cleaning cycle 
with every power on. The R-series are far less likely to clog than the 
C-series. You can also modify a C-series printer like this, but it 
requires popping the right side of the printer case off or carefully 
cutting a hole in the back of it. C-series should be run constantly, 
or the Durabrite ink will definitely clog the printhead, even with the 
continual cleaning cycles - run a search through comp.periphs.printers 
and you'll see over half the complaints are of a Epson C printer 
getting jammed up.

I still think the Durabrite ink might be able to print on metal, and 
you should be able to trick the R200/300 into using it with swapped 
chips, since the printhead is pretty much the same thing, except 
6-color instead of 4-color. Not something I'd be trying on my own 
since the only reason I bought it is for the CD printing, before I 
found out that Canons can do it too.