Consumables! No matter what your printer - jet, laser - they will ruin you. The cost per unit weight of black Hewlett Packard ink has been greater than the cost per unit weight of donated blood, and shareholders all over the world cheered.

The author, an avid retrocomputer, has long been interested in vintage printers. Initially, he studied the device of large copiers , but then found that increasingly restores the matrix printers of the eighties. Nowadays, their physical obsolescence is added to the moral obsolescence, and this is also manifested in the drying of the cartridges.
')
Some of the printers still produce cartridges, and inexpensive, but the delivery is long, and the geeks are impatient. For more rare models of printers and rare cartridges, and sometimes they can not be found at all. Therefore, the author, together with his hobby colleague under the nickname Cosmos2000, decided to try to fill them.

The one who does nothing is not mistaken

In the past, the author worked as a graphic designer at a hardware store. He wrote by hand huge price tags - all A4 sheet or even A3 - large rectangular brushes, periodically placed in a bucket of paint. For several months, the paint thickened, and it became less and less convenient to work. It was restored by denatured alcohol, but still it turned out to be somewhat worse than the new one from the store.

Something similar the author suggested to do with the tape in the cartridge, but it was necessary to take paint somewhere. The first thought is to disassemble a permanent marker. Squeeze the paint out of the tube with a sponge into the jar, mix it with denatured alcohol ...

The tape in the cartridge to the printer Epson GX-80 was a length of about two meters. It is endless and accordion-packed. The cartridge was disassembled, trying not to break any of the latches (which failed), and the whole tape was immersed in the solution.


The ink ribbon in the matrix cartridge is approximately the same as the tape in the Roland Space Echo reverb.

Back into the cartridge tape slowly wound with a built-in manual rewind mechanism with a ratchet, trying to avoid getting the paint on something and using rubber gloves. The result was terrible. The denatural was taken too much, so the paint was not applied to the tape, but washed away from it.

Second try

The second time the cartridge decided not to disassemble, so as not to break the remaining latches. Having examined another similar marker, the paint from the tube was slowly squeezed onto the tape, while rewinding it.

After covering the entire tape, the cartridge was placed in the printer and tried to print something. At first the lines turned out to be pale and unreadable, but then - all the more dark.


Almost success, but can it be done even better?

Sure you may!

The paint on the tape is already there, there is no uniformity of its application. And here Cosmos2000 remembered that at the beginning of the 2000s I heard about the method of tape recovery using the WD-40. A strange way, but only experience will show whether it is effective.

The agent was inserted through a thin tube attached to the cartridge directly to the part of the cartridge where the tape was arranged with an accordion.



And here is the cartridge in the printer, the needles in the print head are buzzing, and the drum rewinds the paper. The paper absorbed the surplus WD-40 until it was left exactly as needed. And the lines were getting darker, and finally the cartridge worked just as well as the new one.

How long is it enough?

The exact life of the cartridge restored in this way is unknown, but for four months now it has been printing perfectly. The replacement cartridge has already arrived, but it has not yet been needed - it lies in the package. Following the Epson, the Commodore MPS-1230 printer was put into operation, although the initial cartridge run took a longer time, since the WD-40 was overdone.


And it already prints Commodore

Now it is clear how to paint the tape without disassembling the cartridge, using only the manual rewind mechanism, and how to redistribute it evenly throughout the entire tape.

In general, now let your vintage printers be fun, printing as well as when they were new. And the translator advises not to overdo it, and after two three or three such refills, change the tape in the cartridge itself. If it is worn through, the print head may be damaged. Also, the article does not disclose the topic of refilling the ink pad available in some cartridges.