No more taping plans together for me!

[willsonman]

Just find a larger printer She suggested I try some cartridge cleaning techniques. I got one cartridge to register but I'll try the other three again tomorrow. If it does not work I for sure will need a new carriage. Pretty sure I've got them going right now but I wanted to see how they settle overnight and give the pores on the print heads another go.

 

[willsonman]

Thought I would post a picture of my new toy. She is in great shape. Just need to get her printing. For size reference, there is a 1-foot (12-in) metal ruler on the top of it.

 

[JasonEricAnderson]

That is awesome. I've been reading up on DIY CNC machines and plotters. I've already got the OK from the wife to get some sort of 3 axis machine with some of our tax return. I was thinking it would be great to have a 'simple' plotter designed to work at 20x30 that could just draw or better yet, score the plans for me.

 

[jhitesma]

If you have the room for it a 3 axis CNC would be a great option. Would be trivial to swap out the tool head for a pen and use it as a plotter as well - or with a small enough tool it could potentially cut the foam.

I've wanted to build one for years...but just don't have the space The last house I lived in was a rental and I had a big insulated and air conditioned two car garage that I used the heck out of. When we were shopping for our first house about 7 years ago there were two front runners - one with a big two car garage and living room - but tiny kitchen and bedrooms and an odd cul-de-sac corner lot with most of the yard as "side yard" or "front yard". And the house we wound up with which has lots of covered driveway but no garage We do have a slightly larger kitchen (with a commercial 6 burner oven that rocks) and we have a second fully equipped outside kitchen and covered RV parking and a separate standalone office which was nice since until a few years ago I worked from home. But with no garage my bigger projects have languished I really need to clean the office out and turn it into more of a shop...just haven't had time since it was our daughter being born that prompted me to start working at a real office instead of from home so time became very limited

Except now I have to clean the office to make room for the printer...don't think I could fit a CNC in there though


That 450c looks great! Kind of wish mine was a color one but I'll take B&W over nothing any day! Can't quite tell from the photo but is it a 24" like mine or did you score a full 36" model?

 

[willsonman]

Full 36". It was used in a "contract systems integration" firm. It was very clean and no belt chunkies so its in fairly good shape. Need to order new ink before I order the new carriage. I want to pull some things out anyway and clean them. Ink gunks up over time and I do not want it to bite me down the road. Had too many inkjets give me troubles. My wife is a graphic designer and has a professional inkjet. We love it when it works... hate it when it doesn't.

 

[RoyBro]

Cheap Paper Tip

Go to your local newspaper and pick up some of their "end rolls". If they aren't free, they are usually some nominal charge. You can use a power saw to cut it to the width you want. We would cut it to 36", which is perfect for full sheet plans.

The amount of paper on an end roll is variable depending on how efficient the transition from one roll to another. In case you've never seen it happen, it really is something to watch. When one roll of paper is low, they spin up another roll to the same speed, and the paper is "pasted" to the running paper, which is simultaneously cut. All this happens at around 60 mph.

The result is a certain amount of paper left over on each roll.



This paper works great on inkjet plotters.

 

[jhitesma]

My wife actually works as a copy editor at our local paper - so we always have end rolls around.

But the ID of the core is too big to fit in the HP plotters. Since a 150' roll of HP paper is <$15 delivered it wasn't really worth it to me to try and re-roll the end roll paper onto the empty core from the roll that came with my plotter.

Plus the end rolls she gets are only about 22" wide for some reason. And the paper quality is HORRIBLE and does NOT work well in any ink jet I've tried it in. The ink bleeds like crazy. But that may just be the ultra cheap paper our local paper uses So even rigging up a different support for the roll was more effort than I felt it was worth.

I was really excited at first about the possibility of free paper. But after a few experiments it just turned out to be more hassle than it was worth. Plus our local paper has been known to charge for the end rolls when things are tight...and with their new owners and crazy changes they're making I expect them to start doing that again any day now.

 

[willsonman]

Agreed. With how cheap a roll is to buy new the quality and aggravation an end-roll would provide are far outweighed.

 

[RoyBro]

My wife actually works as a copy editor at our local paper - so we always have end rolls around.

Which Paper. Is it part of Lee?

But the ID of the core is too big to fit in the HP plotters. Since a 150' roll of HP paper is <$15 delivered it wasn't really worth it to me to try and re-roll the end roll paper onto the empty core from the roll that came with my plotter.

Plus the end rolls she gets are only about 22" wide for some reason. And the paper quality is HORRIBLE and does NOT work well in any ink jet I've tried it in. The ink bleeds like crazy. But that may just be the ultra cheap paper our local paper uses So even rigging up a different support for the roll was more effort than I felt it was worth.

That's too bad. The rolls we use fit the HP Designjet 1050 perfectly. Those 22" width rolls we call "dinks". Yes, "dinks". We used lots of funny terminology in the newspaper business. We would start with a 44" roll and cut it down to 36". Our art department used to print proofs on the plotter to show customers how their ad would look on the newsprint. It's not the best quality paper for sure, but it is good enough for the plans.

I was really excited at first about the possibility of free paper. But after a few experiments it just turned out to be more hassle than it was worth. Plus our local paper has been known to charge for the end rolls when things are tight...and with their new owners and crazy changes they're making I expect them to start doing that again any day now.

Again, that's too bad. Newspapers all over are in pretty tough shape. Even if they are doing well, everyone expects print to eventually fail because of the digital revolution.

If only I could locate a free plotter to go along with my free paper.

 

[jhitesma]

Which Paper. Is it part of Lee?

Yuma Sun, they've changed owners more times than I can count in the 14 years I've been here. I know they were Ganet for awhile and I believe most recently were Freedom and are now Rhode Island Suburban Newspapers Inc. which is part of Horizon - the Sun is the biggest paper they own apparently. This latest sale has been pretty devastating to the paper, lots of layoffs and the company apparently has little experience with papers of their size and couldn't afford the software licenses for the production software and switched to something else which is designed for smaller publications and has made production a lot more difficult. I doubt it's saving them any money to boot because since they change my wife hasn't had a week go by without substantial overtime because of how much longer it takes to do anything with the new software. Things were rough for a long time but now they're just barely bearable and we're really trying hard to find her a better job.

That's too bad. The rolls we use fit the HP Designjet 1050 perfectly. Those 22" width rolls we call "dinks". Yes, "dinks". We used lots of funny terminology in the newspaper business. We would start with a 44" roll and cut it down to 36". Our art department used to print proofs on the plotter to show customers how their ad would look on the newsprint. It's not the best quality paper for sure, but it is good enough for the plans.

My first "real" job was as a paperboy which was a great introduction to the business since it got me a lot of behind the scenes access and personal tours of the production facility (that was at the Lorain Journal back in Ohio.) Though High School I was pretty sure I'd be pursuing photojournalism as a career and spent a lot of time learning how to help improve the print quality and photo reproduction ability for our schools paper which was printed on another local papers press. By college though I was convinced that while I enjoyed photojournalism and all my instructors/professors said I had a knack for it I just couldn't see it as a career and instead majored in photo illustration. At least I tried to. My advisers fought it tooth and nail and even though I have a dozen signed and approved requests to transfer to the illustration program in my file they never actually made the change and left me stuck in the photoj program. Which is a big part of why I never got my degree. Even after escalating it about 4 levels higher and being assured it would be corrected I had reached a point where I was doing web design on the side (this was back in the mid 90's when web design wasn't even considered a full time profession!) and decided to just start my own business doing web design full time instead of continuing to fight the school. A few years of that convinced me I hated web design but loved web development and partnered with a childhood friend who did enjoy design so our skills meshed nicely. And after a few years of that I learned that I hated running my own business while he was quite good at it so I shuttered mine and started working for him and still do. He actually got his start in web design by interning at the Yuma Sun where he built their first website and was offered a job heading their new media department after graduation. Thankfully he didn't see eye to eye with management and struck out on his own a year or so before I decided to give up on school which is how I ended up here in AZ.


So yeah, I was pretty excited about being able to use up some of our end rolls. At least they're still fun for our daughter to color on and are handy for a lot of other things. I still remember being shocked the first time I toured a press room and saw that they used end rolls as paper towels because they always had them on hand and dealing with ink hand washing happened fairly often Some tough skin on hands in that press room!

Again, that's too bad. Newspapers all over are in pretty tough shape. Even if they are doing well, everyone expects print to eventually fail because of the digital revolution.

Yeah, ours is really hurting after this last sale. They just launched a new website with a paywall to try and earn more revenue...but I suspect it's costing them more than it's making as very few people want to pay for it since their local reporting is so mediocre and they killed their pageviews with the paywall so advertising rates are plummeting.

If only I could locate a free plotter to go along with my free paper.

Just keep looking! They're out there, these HP's are built like tanks and are fairly easy to repair it turns out.

Oh - and I was able to confirm it was a rat living in mine. Apparently the previous owner had a pet rat get loose and never found it

 

[RoyBro]

I work at The Billings Gazette in Billings Montana. The Arizona Daily Sun is a sister paper in Phoenix.

 

[jhitesma]

Aren't they in Flagstaff? I know the AZ Star is in Tucson and the Republic is out of Phoenix. Too many similar names around here to keep them all straight I know at one time my wife had looked at switching to a paper out of Mesa (Tribune IIRC) that was owned by the same company as the Yuma Sun at the time...but good thing she didn't as they shut that one down shortly before selling the Yuma Sun.

Heck even the Yuma Sun is hard to keep track of. Since I moved here it's gone by "Yuma Daily Sun" then "The Sun" and lately "Yuma Sun" though pretty much every still calls it the full "Yuma Daily Sun" even though that hasn't been the official name in over a decade.

 

[willsonman]

Success! well, sort of. I was able to trick my magenta cartridge into being black! Got a couple basic prints out on some scrap so I do not waste what paper I have on the roll for right now. Looks like I just need new cartridges. This is all after I cleaned out the spatoon and the ink purge area. I ran the carrier diagnostic in service mode 1 and it returned fine in communication but did say the cartridges were bad but the magenta. I knocked off some plastic tabs just to see if I could fool it. It worked. Looks like I got a fully-functioning plotter with bad ink for $20!

 

[jhitesma]

Outstanding! Heck even that's good enough for plans, not optimal but good enough!

If your cartridges are halfway decent you could try cleaning and refilling them. Mine were in very sorry shape or I would have tried that with them first.

Now I'm really wishing mine was color

 

[willsonman]

Well, I think the other cartridges are just bad. I tried soaking the heads and got good ink flow but they will not be recognized by the plotter. A new black is on its way and should be here Thursday. Once I have a full set I'll have a much better idea of the shape this on is in. I'm hoping the new ink will be recognized right away and I will not have further problems but I'm not concluding that a design firm unloaded a "broken" plotter because the ink was bad. Seems like they would have thought to replace the ink before they gave up on it. The big part for me, at this point, is that there is no major repair involved. I probably should replace the belt for good insurance, or at least have one on-hand for when it does go.

 

[jhitesma]

Given that ink isn't exactly an off the shelf item anymore on these older printers I could see a design shop phasing them out if there's no longer a local source for ink. And given that the ink I have found for mine on-line is either refurbished or expired - neither of which I'd want to use in a production environment - I can actually kind of see them unloading it because it's out of ink. After all as old as these are they've probably recouped their investment and with more and more people outsourcing their large format printing....

 

[willsonman]

I agree on those points. In my general research on the ink, as long as it was manufactured after '96 you are good to go. The pre-96 inks used a slightly different nozzle design that lent itself to leaking if left unused for more than 5 years. The newer style does not have this issue. As long as the protective film is in place there is no risk for air to get in a clog things up. Now, pigment stabilization is another point that can be addressed by those looking for 36" wide photos. The inks will provide slightly inconsistent colors but when you are plotting airplane plans... WHO CARES? There are ink refill kits out there and I think I'll pick one up. Most folks seem to get 3-4 uses from one of these. Remember, these machines were manufactured at a time when the machines themselves were an elitist item. They were designed to take a beating and do real work! I view it like this... you can buy a new car that will have a $500 electrical problem that requires a certified technician with dealer computer stuff to re-program... or buy an old NOVA that will have the same symptoms but will require a $50 item and a little elbow grease and a google search.

 

[jhitesma]

Yep! Our needs are a lot less exacting than people using these in production environments. That's a big part of why I didn't mind buying expired carts off of ebay. Though I do wish I knew just how expired they are. They came with no boxes and the exp date is on the box. The inner foil pouch is all they came in and those are still sealed so I'm hoping they're ok - but no clue when they were manufactured. Still for $12 S&H included it was worth the risk to me. But since the remanufactured ones I ordered for twice as much arrived sooner they're what I'm using for now. When they run out I'll probably pick up a refill kit to try.

Just so nice to have hardware built before these things were considered disposable. It's just crazy that most of the printers I now own cost less than the ink refills for them!

I used an old Canon BJ-200 for a LONG time and it was hands down the best printer I've ever owned. Bought it new in 1992 for around $150 which was a lot for me to spend as a junior in high school. But I still have it and it still works and ink for it is still dirt cheap. I only stopped using it because 1) it's parallel only and a USB to parallel cable was more than I wanted to spend to keep a 20 year old printer going. 2) I picked up a Brother HL1440 refurbished laser for $100 about 10 years back and have been using it for all my B&W printing since it's quicker, has USB, and despite going through 3 boxes of paper with it I've only had to replace the toner in it twice.

 

[willsonman]

Yeah, I had one of those PSC units from walmart for about $70. Then I went to buy new ink... $40!... PER CARTRIDGE! So, 2 cartridges and you have paid more than what the new printer was NEW. Its sick. The Brother laser we had was nice but the drums are $$$ to replace. It was an $800 printer and was great! The prints were flawless. Then the wife had a project that required a lot of color variance and it was just not happy. Printing labels on a laser... never do it... ever. Period. It will ruin it just like putting chewing gum into it. You may think one or two sheets is ok... Just don't do it.

 

[willsonman]

Got my real black ink in tonight. Works like a charm. I really think it was just bad ink at this point. (goes to knock on wood)