johnhlee@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Vince Lee) (09/11/89)
I'd like to proudly announce some success if refilling Paintjet cartridges! As I posted before, I had little success a few months ago trying to use watercolors or food dyes to refill the cartridges. Fortunately, there are now several companies putting out inks specifically for refilling printer ink cartridges. I was curious if these inks would work in the Paintjet without clogging the jets. Watercolors worked at first, but would dry out and clog after a few hours of non-use. I ordered a bottle of black ink from "inky-dink" and voila! It worked great! I let it sit for 4 days and tried again, It still worked great. Procedure: Drill a 1/8" hole in the top of an empty cartride about midway in height. If filling a color jet, drill behind the appropriate set of jets. A black cartridge holds about 5cc's, so each color should hold about 1 1/2 cc's. Seal the hole with sticky-tape, prime, and use. Inky-Dink (Software sensations) sells black, yellow, cyan, and magenta inks at $11.95 for a 17cc bottle. The bottle is like the kind used for nasal spray, so you can refill cartridges directly from it. 17cc's is enough for 3 ink cartridges, so you're paying about $4 per refill! Of course, the resistive print elements must have a finite design life, but I have no idea how many refills you can get from a cartridge. (I assume there is no endurance limit Se for the materials used, but lets hope its at least in the high-cycle region) Inky-Dink advertises in AmigaWorld and their number is (213)277-8272. I have yet to get color inks, so I don't know how good the color matching is. -Vince