Maintaining your sublimation printer is essential in order to consistently have good prints. Sometimes ink can dry out and cause lines to print on your paper (banding) which will ruin your prints. In order to avoid this, you should clean your printer heads frequently! In this blog, we will teach you how to do a nozzle check and clean your printer heads on an Epson Surecolor F170 sublimation printer.
Instructions:
Turn your printer on. Then, using the keypad on the right, select maintenance.
You will then see this screen. Select “Print Head Nozzle Check” It will tell you to load Letter/A4 size paper into the cassette, so make sure you have paper in your printer.
Then, select print. It will print rather quickly. Once the paper comes out, check to see what printed pattern it looks more like.
If the printed pattern looks like this or worse, you should clean your printer heads. To do that, go back to the main menu by pressing the home button. Then press Maintenance again. From there, you will use the arrows to scroll to Print Head Cleaning.
This next process will take a little longer (around 4 minutes). Once it is complete, this screen will appear. Select Check.
After this process is complete, it will print out another sheet. It should look like this.
Once your printed pattern looks like this, you are good to go! Some recommend doing this before every printing session, but if you are running your printer everyday, you shouldn’t have to do this more than once a week. For more information on sublimation and how it can be a beneficial resource to your business, check out our blog “The Dye Sublimation Advantage”.