Q: What does Maintenance mean for my equipment?
A: For Inkjet equipment, Maintenance is a critical activity. Constant quality, reliability and life cycle heavily depend on Maintenance even more than on traditional equipment. There are a number of different opinions on what is the best way to do it. We believe it is best to follow manufacturers’ recommendations and common sense. Consistently.
Q: How frequently does Maintenance have to be performed?
A: That depends on the hardware, but some general rules apply; usually there are daily, weekly, and some longer intervals.
Q: Daily?
A: Starting up printer is great opportunity to restore perfect daily conditions. Usually that means purging ink through printheads manually followed by wiping using special wiping cloth or running predefined cleaning cycle - depending on hardware. This cycle is ideal opportunity for status inspection taking material proof of printing conditions.
Q: Are there other Maintenance cycles?
A: We highly recommend never skipping the weekly maintenance cycle. Inkjet operation is never completely free of tiny drops of ink, so small that they are considered to be an aerosol. Those drops find their way back to printer components due to air turbulence and other effects, and dry or cure there. Sometimes it’s just dirt, but sometimes, depending on where it lands, it can become a degrading factor. For instance - the nozzle plate or power connector. During weekly Maintenance, we should aim to perform deeper cleaning and a thorough printer inspection.
Q: What is the Wet Wipe cycle?
A: The Wet Wipe cycle is when heads are first wiped with a cloth soaked with flush (from the currently used ink set, or some specialized fluids), followed by a 5-10s purge, followed by a wipe with a dry, clean cloth. Sometimes, it is smart to do a 5s purge before the Wipe cycle - but that depends on the hardware. This ensures that the deposit of aerosol drops is removed before it becomes a problem. It takes a little more time than the daily cycle, but it helps a lot.
Q: Who is supposed to do all this? We don’t have time to do it.
A: Daily and weekly cycles are done by operators and take less than 5 min per instance. Skipping them is bad practice, leading to low production quality and premature degradation of equipment. Longer-term maintenance, like yearly interventions, is done by qualified engineers and usually takes 4-6h (or more) to recalibrate systems to optimal levels as well as to perform a detailed systems inspection. During these interventions, some consumables are replaced - like ink filters, air filters, lubrication plates, seals, etc…