CTS Head Failure - How to tell?

[brandon]

Hello All,

So we have had our unit for a little over a year now and things have been okay. Good piece of equipment, like it a lot, learning curve is okay, but there have been some issues along the way but we have learned a lot and have somewhat tamed the beast. Or so we thought. So here goes.

A few months ago we started getting bad nozzle checks even after all recommended maintenance. We even do more than the recommended maintenance as I wanted to avoid any issues. We we received a packet of info on Purging Ink and Purging Flush. That worked for awhile and yes I am aware that the Flush fluid is caustic and we always try to avoid that. That is a last ditch thing for us.

So that works for a few months as issues arose but a couple of weeks ago we started missing whole sections on nozzle checks. So tech remotes in does some changes and so forth. Good to go for a until Friday morning. All week no issues but Friday morning we are missing a section all across the top. Weird. Do several deeps cleans, auto cleans, nozzle checks. After an hour or two of this we call support and we then cap the head in the cleaning solution as told for a couple of hours. That actually made it slightly worse so we were told we can do it overnight. Did that and now it is Saturday night and here I am asking for help as that made it worse.

Pictures attached. Picture inf_5 is Friday morning with 1. being what happened, 2. being after sitting a couple of hours in cleaning solution.  Picture inf_6 is now Saturday with 2. being Friday overnight in cleaning solution and 3. being Saturday night. I am not going to let is sit in solution again.

It just seems odd that the nozzle check is missing uniform and when it gets worse it is still uniform. This is just weird. Ever since we got the changes a couple of weeks ago we have had weird crashes and other odd jumpy things.

If anyone has had this happen before please let me know. I now have to be here for several hours outputting film for the week. Yaaay luck me. The unit is an I-Image S and I can really use some help right now. Thank you!

[Colin]

WOW!  Makes my issues look tame Brandon....

You haven't switched out to T6 yet right?  Still running what it came with?

Have you cleaned the head - done some prints/test prints - then looked at the head to see if any ink is pooling at the nozzles?  I would assume if the nozzles are clogged/not firing there would be none..... hmmm, do you end up with any dripping spots?  maybe the nozzles are not firing and pooling ink at the head?

For what its worth, since the techs came in and changed our head we are running a 1.6 negative pressure.  FAR from the 1.9-2.0 negative pressure at the factory...  I hate T6 in my environment - apparently 31%-36% relative humidity is to dry for it..... Feel like a freakin guinea pig...

[Lizard]

We had a similar issue with part of a head not firing. Had to replace the head.

I feel your pain switching work flow mid stream. We recently added a second unit for this reason. These things will break and always at the worse time. Now that the smaller units are out I would recommend two of those over the larger machine. Redundancy.

[Underbase37]

It does look to possibly be the head going bad. Hopefully it didn't accidentally partially get wiped when doing maintenance.

Have you had any sudden power outages?
Could be a faulty head-board.
Have you shut the machine down completely for a few hours and do a full power cycle?

You could do a manual flush using a syringe. You would need to talk with M&R to get the details on how to do this, and I'm sure they will not like this options, as this is not really a suggested solution. ( Also not the best idea to do without a head for backup )



Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk

[brandon]

It does look to possibly be the head going bad. Hopefully it didn't accidentally partially get wiped when doing maintenance.

Have you had any sudden power outages?
Could be a faulty head-board.
Have you shut the machine down completely for a few hours and do a full power cycle?

You could do a manual flush using a syringe. You would need to talk with M&R to get the details on how to do this, and I'm sure they will not like this options, as this is not really a suggested solution. ( Also not the best idea to do without a head for backup )



Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk

Ah, thank you for reminding me. A couple of months back we were told to replace a board and possibly the head but it was loose wiring. I'm going to recheck that next. I've been told to replace to head 3 times now and it has never been the head so I'm kind of over that. What does letting the machine sit shut down for a few hours do? I am all ears.

[Dottonedan]

Brandon,

Shutting the machine down, (only need to be shut down for 5 min) is a way to purge any remaining lingering power to the boards for a clean refresh.
The shorter the time, the more chance you stand of possibly still having some remaining power.

The problem with determining head issues, is that there can literally be 10-15 different things that can cause a head issue and some of them provide very similar characteristics. Of course, that makes it harder to pin point. While you might think that Techs play phone support by a script, (The course of action) It's not.  SOP, each tech goes down the list of things (they know in their head) and what seems to be most common. It's not scripted on paper. "many issues" seem to be almost too random or organic and require many questions with the answers taking you in different directions to be scripted.

Often times, the quickest way to resolve an issue that you are not sure of, is to through the most common resolve at it. (Replace heads). That route is costly, but often (9 times out of 10) does the trick...but may not actually solve why you are getting these issues in the fist place. Many customers who just need to go full out on production every day with 300 screens just wants to spend that money on new heads (whatever the cost, just get it done) is a common answer...while smaller more cost conservative customers find head replacements detrimental to their business.

Brandons pics are alarming. Any time that I've seen noz checks like that, they needed replaced. Be aware (disclaimer), there are always the unique situations where you can get these back, but it's rare. very rare and then you need to weigh out the time invested of being down.

I've not had that experience with prints like this where I was able to bring them back. I've brought back some for sure, but they were not looking like this and it was only a few of them I was able to do in a decent amount of time.

When I had come across heads (like this) in the pictures, A head replacement was my only answer (that I had experienced).
Having said that, You might possibly get this head back...if you were to remove it, (approx. 15-30 min to remove), and spend anywhere from 2-6 hrs of repeated gently flushed with a syringe over a sink, using isopropyl alcohol, Pink cleaning solution and distilled water, back and fourth, gently, flushing and filling for 4-6 hrs. In the end, it may still not ever work. So it's a coin toss.



I don't know if the ink was ever your problem on this, (could have been just bad luck on the head (1 bad in batch of 100?), Could be the INK was not the best fit for your shop. Some are finding better results with the new T6 over the D2A, so give that a try as well as a head replacement.

Brandon sounds like he's done the right things all along. Doing (more than) the average maintenance is great. That's what we do now and use D2A with no issues.  I will say, we have 3 heads and one of them has about 2-3 jets blocked in it that we cannot get out. It was there before I came on board and probably was due to a lack of maintenance at that time (but they were new to it and didn't get 100% training on it at the time due to a new building and no power at the time of install.


With that tho, it (Sounds like) you are doing everything right.

I'm not saying this is the case with Brandon, but Techs hear this every day because a customer/employee never wants to admit they weren't doing things right.

Tech: Do you do a nozzle check every morning?. Yes. Every morning? Yes, every morning. How does that nozzle check look every morning and if you see any issues, do you fix those issues before doing production? Yes, we fix those issues. We get good nozzle checks every day (until this last week).

Ok, so good noz check practice then. (Tech at this point should have the customer walk through their process of clearing out any print issues in the noz checks). They should ask, HOW, do you clear out the ink lines?  Convince me you are doing this process correctly. They often take the customers word, but it's a tight rope we must walk. We don't want to give the impression that we think the customer is dumb or something so you have to be articulate in how you ask these questions. Some are not good at it.

Did you flush the heads to get all of the air out of the line?  YES. Did that. Did you do this? Yes, did that. Try this?  yes, yes yes.
Customer says, Hey, we did all of that, been doing it for three days now with other Techs, and it's not working! We need someone down here!

and so we get scheduled to fly in...to find that the customer didn't really do this and this and this and that AND, had never done it right when they did do it. So that kind of customer situation was not uncommon. Those are probably 4 out of 10 customers so you can imagine that we are always very leery when customers say, They have done everything right and always do their maintenance.

I had one customer go through all of this with me on the phone, and then I finally had them take a picture of the ink lines and it showed all of the nozzle valves were closed. They said it was in the print ready position. Closed?  How can you print that way?  So they were mixed up on (closed and open positions) of the link valves. This happened, be cause their normal buy left the co.  and they were running the machine on their own with no experience for several days like that. (happens a lot).  Even when you have the maintenance sheets right in front of you, sometimes it can be read differently than it is written I guess.

[brandon]

Thanks everyone for the responses, I appreciate it. When we do deep cleans and often besides the daily maintenance the machine is shut down longer than five minutes so that answers that. I didn't know if there was something else that would happen over a few hours but apparently not. So good there. For ink we are still D2A and planning on doing a change to the new ink but we were / are planning on getting a few days ahead in screens in case something like this happens. But for what it's worth the official word I got was no matter what ink type and no matter how many screens a day five or fifty or one hundred expect no more than one year out of a head. So if you have a one head or three heads expect to replace every twelve months.

[Colin]

Awesome answers from Dan.

I am feeling some burn still from over 2 months of dealing with my own iimage issues, so please forgive some of my attitude and wordings

But, double check that your environmental humidity is within the parameters of the T6 ink.  You are super detail oriented being a waterbased ink shop.  I know you are in a moist area, but is your screen room dry, low humidity etc...  The T6 ink I was told to install will crack (cracked earth look) on my screens and if I back an image up, the first print will start to pull away from the edges of the print, shredding my screen edges (basically causing low opacity/uv blocking).  My screens are in a box in the low 30's% for humidity and my environment is low to mid 30%.  We are also using the same emulsion

Hope its fixed soon

[brandon]

Humidity in our screen room is between 30 and 35 percent.

[brandon]

Basically nothing has changed just the head decided to stop working correctly. So something is going on or it has given up and needs to be replaced. It is just weird all of the recommended "fixes" have made it uniformly worse.

[Colin]

Yup.

When you get your head replaced, double check that M&R still recommends that you use the T6 in your environment.  Its pretty much identical to mine.

[brandon]

The funniest thing today using film again is we had no tape in the shop. Had to go over to the neighbors

[LoneWolf2]

Luckily I haven't had these problems yet (knock on wood), just lots of cleaning and fighting with the D2a, but it seems kind of ridiculous to pay as much as we do for these units, and then have to turn around and replace the heads in a short time frame. Kinda defeats the cost savings stand-point of the units. Granted, I know not everyone has these issues pop up, but it sure seems to be an issue quite a bit more often here lately.

[brandon]

Head and tech fly in today and hopefully back up and running. Then make some sort of art project with this week's left over film.

[ZooCity]

I'm sorry to see that brandon.

I agree lonewolf.  Regardless of brand, masking media type (wax or ink) and print head version it seems to be endemic to CTS units to blow high cost heads all the time.  Seeing more and more feedback like this is eye opening and it corroborates our overall experience which, again, totally different machine but so many similarities between the issues with them all.   Your comment sums up why we don't have CTS in here anymore.