I have recently refilled my Lexmark x1180 printer's color ink. I have done it before without problem, but now it is acting up.I know that each of the 3 colors inside are all full yet it shows up as nearly empty and will not print any colour. I have cleaned the contacts with alcohol. Could this be a problem?
You do have some air between the fresh ink and the printhead holes. Sometimes different inks will react together and clump up in the printhead, and this will need to be flushed out. Although they make quite a fuss about it, I've never had a problem caused by my cleaning the printhead on the cartridges-and I've used acetone, alcohol and just dunked'em under a stream of hot water from the sink till they bleed yellow, cyan and magenta. Then I dry them off and blot any oozing ink off the printhead before re-installing them. Then, it's a good idea to run the print head cleaning cycle several times, until you've established good ink flow. Another trick is to kind of shake the ink down into the printhead pads (internal to the inkwells) sort of like you'd shake down the mercury in an old thermometer. I've also used a cartridge re-filling syringe to pressurize the wells with a few cc's of air injected into the fill hole, while plugging the vent hole in each color's ink well. Sometimes though, the pads are dried beyond re-inkage, and you gotta spring for another cartridge.



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