Artist vs. Printer

When I finished up graduate school nearly a year ago and began taking jobs as an illustrator, I expected to do a little traveling.  Baltimore, Ithaca, Costa Rica… but I never expected to venture into printer repair.

I have two Canon Pixma MX700s (well, one is mine, the other is my father’s).  In a joint attempt to “stick it to the man”, we installed identical continuous ink flow systems, effectively voiding the warranties of both printers.  Now, about a year and a half later, both printers have crapped out simultaneously, spitting out the same error code.

Now, as an artist, I desperately need a printer.  I also do not have a lot of money to purchase new printers willy-nilly.  Finally, the idea of throwing away a perfectly good piece of equipment when the problem might be as trivial as a fingerprint on a sensor just irks me.  (Paying Canon $150 to tell me there was a fingerprint on a sensor also irks me).

So, I coughed up $15, and bought the MX700 service manual from semi-sketchy e-manual.com.  I also consulted the forums of fixyourownprinter.com, where I learned that the error code being spit out by both printers was mainly the result of a little windshield wiper-like device getting stuck in some dried ink, easily accessible without disassembling anything.   8 hours (and one dissected printer) later, one printer is working like new and the other is well on it’s way to recovery (and would probably be further on the path to recovery had a hacksaw not been involved).  Thank you, fixyourownprinter.com, you may have saved me $400.

You probably won't have to do this.

Advertisement

---