In article , Lee Blaver
writes
Dave Plowman wrote:
I've got an old Epson Stylus Color 600. It's used often for B&W, but
rarely for colour. Last time I printed in colour it was OK, but this time
no cyan. I've replaced the cartridge and used the cleaning cycle with no
joy. Is it likely to be a blockage through lack of use or a faulty head?
Any tips on clearing the blockage if it is this?
I've got the service manual for it, and removing the head assembly
is
easy. I'd be happy replace the head if it wasn't too expensive. The snag
with just buying a new printer is that I use it with my old Acorn computer
and most these days are USB rather than parallel. I know it's expensive in
ink, but I refill the black ink one myself, so this doesn't matter.


Have a Google through sci.electronics.repair, this has come up before
not surprisingly, and there were some methods suggested.
IIRC there is an "Official" cleaning/flushing cartridge, but an empty
one refilled with IPA or similar apparently works.

I've heard that this is a relatively common problem for the
separate-head inkjets when left unused for extended periods.

The epson 6xx series is notorious for ink blockage problems, I chucked
mine away eventually and bought a canon because of this.

Standing the print head on a cloth soaked in ammonia is the most
succesful thing I have tried, in combination with putting some ammonia
in a cartridge and running the cleaning routine. Some window cleaning
liquids have ammonia in. You can do this without removing the print head
from the unit.
--
Tim Mitchell