Cleaning the Wiper

As mentioned in my last posting, we were away for several days, visiting relatives in Ohio and Michigan. While in MI I spent a morning shooting with a Nikon D700, quite the alien experience for this Canon user.

My 7900 spends most of its time asleep. I leave it powered up; it goes into standby mode after being idle for ten minutes. Since we expected to be away for at least a week, I shut down the printer. This was on 3 October.

While we were away someone called with a photo restoration job. I collected his two pictures a couple of days ago, did the repairs and touch-up, and today made the six prints the client wants. I decided to power up the printer in "service man mode", and then remove the wiper assembly for inspection and cleaning.

The process is very easy. Eric Gulbransen describes it on his X900 site, and includes a link to a video. The wiper from my printer looked fine, but I guessed the sheen on the rubber "blade" was ink. It sure was. A Pec-pad wetted with distilled water came away from the rubber piece looking like a bad bruise. I dabbed and wiped a bit, until the pad no longer picked up any ink. The clean wiper was still somewhat shiny, which is probably the nature of the material. When I reinstalled the part, the printer took some time "sequencing". The process ended with something that sounded and behaved exactly like a cleaning, except that it seemed rather short in duration. When that finished, I printed a nozzle check, which was 100%. I looked at the ink levels and found them somewhat lower than before the process, confirming that a cleaning did happen. I then made the six prints black-and-white prints for the client.

A piece of the Pec-pad used to clean the wiper, showing the accumulated ink.

My 7900 will be two years old next week. I don't mind cleaning the wiper every couple of years. ;-) I should buy a replacement, just to have on-hand.

  --Jay