AAL        Refilling print cartridges

Again a disclaimer.  You will find when you buy a refilling-kit that some of the instructions are either unclear or simply wrong.  Some of my data below may fall into the same category, so read what I say and then use your loaf.  I am only going to cover black cartridges, I assume colour ones use a similar technology.

There appears to be two types of printer, the type that Hewlett Packard makes and the type that Canon make.  The HP ones have all the clever stuff in the cartridge, whereas the Canon one I have has that part of the technology in the printer with the cartridge being very simple.

The clever part of modern printers is the way that the manufacturer get a tiny amount of ink squirted through a minute set of holes.  The HP-type have the clever electrics in the cartridge.  There is a set of small electrical contacts on the cartridge that make contact with an equivalent set of contacts on the printer.  The Canon-type has theses microscopic holes in the printer.  What the technical merits of the two types are; I do not know.  But I do know that the HP-type cartridges are A GREAT DEAL more expensive to buy.  One salesman remarked: "That's where HP make their money".  The Canon cartridges I uses cost about a fiver apiece at full price.  The quantity of ink is not as large as the HP one, but refilling is a doddle.

I get about a hundred pages of fairly heavily printed paper from a single filling.  I recently ran off about twelve hundred pages of a newsletter that our local residents' Association had delivered   I have got the refilling off to a tee and do it at my PC desk.  Initially I did the refilling on the bench in the workshop.

But YOU MUST TAKE CARE.  If you spill printing ink, it makes a terrible mess.  Always have a  few tissues to hand to collect the minute specks of ink that you will find on the desk.

The Canon cartridge holds a piece of very fine porous sponge.  This sponge appears to be the same as florists sell to put cut flowers in.  (It is called "Oasis")  This sponge is the ink reservoir that feeds the liquid down into the printer where, I assume, the foil with the minute holes is located.  How it works I don't know, but it gives a good quality print.

I don't know of any way to predict that the ink is about to run out other than to check the pages as they come off the printer.  But never let the cartridge run dry or you will find that it doesn't fill properly.  I find that as soon as a page fails to print properly, the cartridge needs refilling.

I bought a half a litre of black ink from an internet retailer at a cost of a little under twenty pounds.  An HP cartridge costs more than that, but they have done the work for you!  I then pour a few milli-litres into a small bottle that came with the initial filling kit.  That kit had a pair of plastic gloves and a syringe.  The needle is far too thick for medical uses, but the syringe dispenses ink at a controlled rate.  I take out the empty cartridge and put it upside down in a plastic cup.  I then drip-drip the ink on to the the exposed sponge and it is absorbed by the sponge.  I keep this up until I see that the ink starting to run out of of the vent hole that is in the top of the cartridge (remember it is now upside down).  I lift the cartridge out of the cup and give it a couple of taps to dislodge any loose liquid from the body.  I then put the cartridge back into the printer.

There will be a small quantity of ink in the cup.  This may be collected using the syringe and returned to the small bottle.  So choose a clean cup to do the filling.  Incidentally, the ink is water soluble, but very tenacious.  You cannot wash it off the skin, although soap and water will lessen the blackness of the stain.

As the Canon cartridge has an exposed piece of foam, there is no need to open the cartridge.  But with the HP-type, it MAY be possible to remove the top and do similarly to the foam in that type of device.  It may even be possible to follow the principle with the three colours of a colour cartridge.

GOOD LUCK.  A half-litre of ink is quite a lot.  One of my refills seems to be about one cubic centimetre of ink.