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Uniform Cadet SP-1400C / SP-540v Red/Yellow Dropout
A couple of days ago while away on holiday I had a text to say our printer hadn’t been working since leaving ten days ago. The red was dropping out.
I was amazed to find out today, now I’m back, that we have had the printer for over 7 years.
We have done bits and pieces to it to keep it going, changing the pump a couple of years ago and with capping stations, tubes, dampers etc being changed from time to time in between a lot of cleaning. We were very light users in the early days giving us a lot of head drying out problems but still have odd days when its not used.
We converted to bulk ink holders a couple of years ago using Colorific Bio Ink to keep costs down. Because a member of staff complained about the smell of the ink, we built an extractor system on the back of it out of normal diy bits which solved all fume problems.The fault doesn’t seem to be the normal drop out. It may have been to begin with but after days of the others doing this, that and the unknown, I think extra faults may have been put on.
The capping station and damper has been changed as well as the tubing around the pump. A lot of buttons may have been pressed over the days so they decided to do a factory reset, … just in case……..
They don’t know if yellow stopped printing before or after the reset but the original fault was just the red dropping out.The ink is pulling through the head ok but not a single pixel is printed of red or yellow. Black & blue are ok.
I swapped over the ribbon cables between the red/yellow & blue/black heads and the red/yellow head then prints in a fashion.
It seems to me because of that, that either software is stopping the head printing or there is a circuit board problem. I’ve checked all ribbon cable connections.
There appears to be head data in the head ranking for H1 & H2 but as the machine is a modified Roland, I wonder if it needs Uniform firmware put in it or after a reset, do you have to do things.
I’m hoping someone will know or have some idea as to what to do. -
2 Replies
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You’re right in saying that the Uniform machine is just a Roland, and any reset of setting shouldn’t need a reload of firmware at all.
It does sound like an electrical fault I’m afraid. When you swapped the heads over, did the K/C head fire at all? I know you said the M/Y printed of sorts, but what sorts do you mean?
Stafford
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Thanks for the reply.
I was using a test page of four colour blocks of 100% of each colour.
Before changing over the ribbon cables it printed K/C correctly but nothing from the M/Y.
After reversing the cables it printed nothing on the K/C, the M printed correctly but the Y printed, but the block was very large compared to what it should have been.With regards to the firmware, you are saying that Uniform never changed from the original Roland SP-540V firmware. I was hoping that they had n’t changed it.
I haven’t been able to locate anything about resets in the service notes or user manual but I would have thought that you would need to enter some data back into it or whats the point of a reset.Charles
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