Saturday, January 10, 2015

Canon MX870 Print Head "Repair"

I'm usually cranky when the directions I want are only available on YouTube because I can read much faster than the video plays, and I find the extra time to be excruciating. Seriously, please just tell me in words!

A few months ago, my Canon PIXMA MX870 printer decided that it would mostly print yellow: no cyan printing, and only sometimes the faintest magenta printing. I suppose the other colors weren't cheerful enough? Some searching indicated that the problem was the print head. I tried all of the printer's built-in cleaning routines to no avail. I looked at replacement printers (I mostly print kid pictures), but I decided to see if I could fix it. It wasn't useful the way it was, replacing it seemed likely, so I had nothing to lose for trying. After a while, all remaining hints pointed YouTube. I decided that removing a print head might be best described in a video, so (prepare yourself for the shock!) I watched YouTube videos about printers.

The video that worked for me was "How to remove and clean a Canon printhead" and it delivered on the promise of its title! I thought I might need to watch "The secret on how to remove the Canon print head" but the first video with some gentle but persistent jiggling was sufficient.

What I had to do was to remove the ink carts, then remove the print head. I rinsed the print head in warm water from my kitchen faucet at a low pressure for several days (in between bouts of going about my regularly scheduled life), until I no longer saw any ink bleeding out when I did so. Yes, I spent days rinsing the print head, but it was essentially a free experiment. La, la, la, several days of rinsing and a day of drying later, I re-installed the print head and the ink carts. And my printer worked again! I couldn't believe something so cheap and easy actually resurrected my printer, but it did! I'm so glad I didn't replace it hastily!

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