I bought a wide format printer from China, and the manual was so poorly translated that I bought the wrong ink for it. Assembled it on a Friday, worked beutifully on anything I put in it, then I went home.
Came back monday, thought, wow, that's pretty strong smell for low odor solvent ink!
Not only did the 1/2 liter ink tanks disolve, but so did the feed lines and the print heads.
Changing the ink tanks and lines to a solvent proof plastic seems easy enough, but how do you change the print heads? The heads of solvent printers are huge in comparison, so the print head width is wrong, and the colors wouldn't register. It could be done easily enough if you wanted to just print single color jobs, as the cheap china printers aren't smart enough to be constantly checking back and forth with their printheads to make sure you're not using a generic, or to tell you it's time to order a new one. Before completely rebuilding the one I got, I tried just installing 1 printhead and inktank/line. Printed in red alone just fine.
Nice thing about a brand new melted printer? I got to tear it apart right away without anyone nagging at me for it. Bad thing, well, I melted a new printer, and have been ribbed about it ever since.
Good luck,
Kathy  |