This is a tale of two brothers. Torley and Merritt Wong.
What was happening was that Merritt is staying over with me for awhile at the family home, and we were printing out some of his art on my fancy schmancy Canon inkjet printer. All was good, crisp, and clear (altho not as vivid as it could have been!) until the magenta ink tank was dipping dangerously low. Ruhroh! What to do now?
It was in months previously that I'd gotten an ink refill kit by IMS. It was pretty cheap compared to the actual taxing costs of cartridges, but my last experience with a refill kit was almost a decade ago, and didn't go well at all. In fact, it was downright sloppy.
This would prove to be too, in its own way. The instructions were scrunchy and convoluted, and as Brothers Wong, we strove to make sense out of the grainy little illustrations and somewhat-convoluted text. Finally, we stepped up to the bat of the grand arena of this colorful ballgame… and everything went wrong.
Ink leaked everywhere, completely turning ye olde workhorse sink into a pantheon of Little Miss Technicolor Deiness & Her Inky Compatriots. It looked kind of kewl, all these marbly swirls (like a children's book I had read once) accumulating and mixing into each other. I don't have a picture but I wish I did now?and for that matter, I could reproduce the effect easily enough if I wanted to!
Drip. Drip. DRIP!
GOOD LORD OHNOES! "Why won't it stop dripping?"
After Merritt expended much effort on drilling holes into the carts with a sharp point and a hammer (the included handscrew was complete inadequate, aka sucked!), we started with trying to insert these little fill plugs included with the kit. Sadly, they were not airtight as the instructions would have led us to believe, and more ink was wasted in this little plastic trepanation experiment.
Drip. Drip. DRIPDROP!
In not one of our brighter moments but learning from applied science, we inserted the leaky carts into the printer, and watched as we flunked one alignment test after another. Much pressing of the Cleaning buttons followed. Some sheer horrors followed, such as a complete absence of yellow showing up (like some melancholic 60s anime print) and multiple blots from inside the beast slopped onto the page, a type of deep cyan blood.
What a horrible waste of time. So without the plugs, we looked inside the kit… there were some ball bearings, dunno why (prolly for another type of cart?)… fluid of some sort, adhesive blue circles that didn't work too well in the first place either as they were quite unsticky!?so then what?
Masking tape. It had to be masking tape. And so we applied it with much zeal, and the inks were refilled. (And test page after test page worked well, one very ugly skidmark running down the page aside. Cleanup began… and down all the wasted ink went, literally down the drain.) At least for the night. We even had a little celebration for our triumph, rejoicing in lower prices per page!
For a night, anyway.
Drip!!!
This morning, I printed another test page out because YOU CAN NEVER BE TOO SURE, and was shocked to find that again, an absence of yellow! There'd been some light magenta-into-yellow contamination, but I didn't think it was that severe. And so, I lifted the ink carts up. DRIP DRIP DRIP! HOT DAMN. Grrr!
Going back to the sink with fiery (watery?) resolve, I began the repetition of last night's events, only this time using duct tape instead of masking to make more certain of the airtightness. It was like a training montage, I tellya… cue pumpin' Rocky IV music by Vince DiCola here!
~deepbreath~
Printed out a trio of test pages, all perfect sans one giant magenta blob, likely transient.
I just told my bro the good news. He sounded very excited, so much that he awoke from his slumber, and now we're printing out more!
Brotherly bonding experience of the highest order.