Today, we will cover how to refill HP's 45 black cartridges or color cartridges for TIJ 2.5 industrial coding. You'll probably have a little plotter look like this, or maybe you have those ancient desktops like this. However, if you sell special cartridges as this one and your production system looks like this, do not refill yourself.

This video is not for those folks who do industrial printing. It's not because we can not refill those cartridges. It is because, logistically, it's tough for you to supply it. Firstly, the HP makes three grades of cartridges. Most home use cartridges look like this 45 home use, and those-- I don't know how HP makes this, this is easy to broken, and you probably refill it just a couple of times. Not much.

Also, HP makes the industrial-grade, like this guy. Those are well made, and you can refill them many, many times. If you just decide to fill yourself and you don't know where to get those excellent cartridges, you have to end up buying the HP original industrial cartridge anyway. Secondly, it's tough for you to get employees, training employees get everything dirty, and you have to air balance after your refill and test it, and eventually, people just give up. Say, "Hey, for my factory, it's not- logistically, it's not profitable for me to allocate my employee's time on this."

For those folks-- The third thing is the ink. When you refill those cartridges, they have special ink in there. For example, this is a fast dry that works on glossy coatings. HP also makes 45si, which is solvent ink. We, Will, work on the different non-porous substrates. For BCH, we not only make two different kinds. Right now, we make about five different kinds of ink that work for this. If you refill yourself, you're probably going to put the wrong ink into your machine.

That's why we encourage people to contact us for the industrial level, and we're going to get a couple of paper samples from you, and we're going to look at your machine, and we decide what kind of ink is the best ink. Then, we can let you send us an empty cartridge and refill it and send it back to you.

For this one, we're going to focus on-- We have one or two cartridges, and we want to refill it. Typically, we start this little kit with Pigment Ink in it. If you're going to use Dye ink, I have to show you how to do the Dye Ink. To show you what we're talking about, the different cartridges. This is a regular home use cartridge, HP 45. This one is empty, and this one is full. Both of those are the lowest grade that HP makes, and they break pretty easily.

Then we have this industrial-level printhead. You can see that this one is different from those two. HP has an even better one than the industrial level. This one looks like an industrial printhead. This one you got from third-party cartridges. They look the same. This one tells you it is a non-OEM-- Let me put a non-HP on the right hand there. This is an actual HP industrial level.

When you flip it over, you can see, this cartridge is a home use cartridge. The same as the crappy stuff like HP make here. The re-fillers bought a regular home use cartridge, filled it up, and sold it as industrial ink. Make you aware that you don't want to end up with this guy at the factory level. Enough for the industrial. This is a home section. I have this one full of ink.

Okay, you can see this cartridge has a little bit of dripping problem here. [silence] The line is a little bit uneven here. Don't surprise by the poor quality. This is a 300 DPI to 600 DPI machine. It's pretty standard. If your ink can print out those machines nicely, you got excellent ink. Also, this is the lowest HP ink.

HP makes three different kinds of ink for this. This HP OEM ink. I'm going to mark this as complete. Now we put an empty cartridge in.

That, as you see, is empty. We have two kits. One is pigment, and one is dyed. The only difference is the two bottles of ink. You can get the kit from bschtechnologies.com. Let's go to the Refill Kit for HP. Then scroll down, and click 45. There, it's this kit. The pigment will tell you its Pigment Ink. The Dye Ink will not tell you anything. This part is the same. You have an air balance clip, and you have a little drill, and you have one green plug.

In the future, or you don't want to buy this ink, you want the accessories. The green plug can be found at accessories, and when you click 'Plug.' The green plug is right here. If you need the air balancing clip, you just go to accessories and go to 'Priming Clip.' It is this Priming Clip. It does not include in a kit, but I highly recommend getting a larger syringe size. Here I use a ten mil. 15 mil is even better. It just makes it a lot easier. Get a bottle of distilled water. One gallon is 80¢.

Then have a little container. What I'm going to do is I'm going to fill it all with a Pigment Ink first. This comes with the pigment kit. We'll print a couple of samples, and then we switch to Dye Ink. I'll let you see the difference. Here is where the HP refill hole is. HP fills up the bag inside. There's an aluminum bag inside. They filled it up, and then they put a little bit- a tiny steel ball here. What we're going to do is we're going to push the steel ball inside.

Then we're going to remove all the ink as much as possible. Then we'll put new ink in. Then we'll seal this hole. Then we still have aired here because there's a bag. We're going to close this, and then we're going to remove air from the printhead. Let's remove the ball first.

You don't need a drill to do this, but you can use anything. Just poke it in. [silence] The HP has some balls. There you go. Go inside. By the way, you won't do this whenever you change the ink type, or you change your ink supplier. If you keep using the same link, you don't need to wash the old ink out. You can just add the new ink indirectly. [silence] Now, we're going to pull the plug on. When you put the plug, this is not sealed. Use your thumb, twist it. It's still not closed. You can see it there.

That's good. What we would do is draw the ink from the top. Another ink will draw the water out from the top. Here's the clip. You put this in, and there's a groove here. You just push forward. You can use the original, the one that comes with the kit. The one that comes with the kit is only five mils. If it doesn't come out, try to reseal it a couple of times until you get it right. I'm going to use ten mils just for a better section. This has been dry for a long time. If you cannot get the ink out, try to put them in a cleaning solution or water to soak them for a couple of hours.

What happened is-- For the silicon pad, there are two columns of silicon pad. Then they are connected in the middle. Then there's a little hole here. That's where you get air sucked out. If your syringe didn't get in deep enough, this hole was not open.

It's now going to suck or if you didn't line up correctly. If you see it carefully, there are two rows of the printhead. You either didn't line up correctly, or this is heavily clogged. There's no ink coming out. It could be both because this one is dry.

You can see it start going-- It was dry. It was clogged. Then after a couple of tries, the ink starts coming out. You can see it's normal. This is-- The first one coming out in the air, and then you get more and more ink.

Most people give up when they cannot draw air out. You just need to try. a couple of times.

You can hear the foil bag collapsed. That means, so we don't have any more water inside now. Just one more. Yes, that's it. Okay. now we can add the refilling in. [silence] To wipe or not to wipe. I'm a wiper. Some people say dab it. I just like it. Look good. Whatever. I do thousands of this. I have never seen that wiping hurt the printhead. I know there's considerable controversy, but I'm the wiper. My biggest complaint is that some ink will come out when you'll take the cap off. When you take it off, what can I say? Be careful. If you cannot get the plug to stay inside like this, just use a piece of duct tape and push it in. Then when you draw the air out, this thing is going to suck it in. Now we're going to do the same thing until a significant amount of ink coming out. You can see it's all air and a little bit more bubbles. It's not lined up correctly. I don't feel any resistance when I do it. I just twist a little bit so I make sure it gets a good contact. Now you can see it is mostly air bubbles. [unintelligible 00:23:54] next one will be ready. Okay, mostly, it's ink now. Now, this one is prepared—wiper alert.

There's some problem here, but it's not related to the ink. You can see the printhead is clogged. This is a very old printhead. We got lots of problems unclogging it first. I'm not surprised. You will see the line is pretty straight here. Compared to HP's, you can remove the blackness, and the straight line is pretty similar. We can reach on the same cartridge.

I ]will compare a brand-new HP cartridge versus one that's already dried. This is how you refill it. If you get a couple of them, fill them together and then store them. We have two kinds of clips. One is a heavy-duty clip. It's the same length and same height as the cartridge. You don't want to directly just put it on it. You can see underneath a foam pad, and if you directly put on it, the foam pad is porous, so the ink will still get absorbed. So you're still going to get a dry cartridge.

One thing I use is professional blue tape, and this is a special tape. This roll is $20. It's a pretty expensive tape. Yes, buy costly. This probably lasts a lifetime. For the professional tape, what you want to do is the sticky part towards the printhead, and the non-sticky part is towards our side. Then you put it on the cartridge clip. Another one is the half clip. This one also has a foam pad underneath, and here are two tabs to clip on here. The foam pad will push the- it's going to move the printhead upwards, making sure it's sealed. Then this part is protecting the ribbon here.

If you don't have blue tape at home, you can just use a regular desktop tape. However, if you use standard tape-- This glue is not special glue. You cannot put this glue on the printhead. You reverse. You put the non-sticky part towards the printhead. What I'll do is I put in here and push in. You can see the foam pad has pushed and sealed the printhead, and there are also two tabs. Make sure it's secure on the side. Then as a paranoid person, as I am, I usually push this back, and I'll make sure that the thing gets pushed down and sealed.

You can grab those storage clips by going to the accessories and go to the storage production clip. Here's the heavy-duty, the black clip, and here's the light-duty, short orange clip. Let's change this Ink to Dye Ink.

We just used our regular BCH Dye Ink. BCH Dye Ink is compatible with all printers, all models. There's no way you can go wrong with Dye Ink.

Not bad. Let's make a comparison. Those two are printed from the same cartridge. Let's see the line. I can see that this cartridge had a problem here, here with the Pigment Ink. It's all straight and smooth for the Dye Ink. I have just compared the pigment of dye for the HP45.

You might think they look similar. When the pigment dry, pigments stay on the top of the page, and the dye will penetrate the paper. The dye goes more profound, and the older Dye Ink is anti-scratching. If you just rub it, nothing is going to come off. The pigment, on the other hand, if it is this kind of porous paper, that's no problem. Scratching is not a problem, but it could be a problem if you have any coated paper. You have to contact us and send out some paper samples. We have anti-abrasion, fast dry Pigment Ink that you can use. The other thing is-- You can see, if you only lay on the top, the line seems to be separate, but here in the Dye Ink, the line is spread out a little bit, because when the Dye Ink penetrates, it's not only penetrated vertically, it also penetrates horizontally. That's why you have this.

Another thing is the bleeding. That's not much. If you print on the double sides of the paper, you can see that I used a permanent marker on the backside: Watch, the pigment already penetrated to the other side. On the backside, the concern is because the Dye Ink is penetrating. On the backside, if your double-sided print pages, you're going to have flossing go to the second page. If you use regular papers, there's no concern. It's not that there's no concern. Both are equally penetrating, so there's no much difference if you just use regular paper. A third difference is the Pigment Ink is weatherproof. Suppose you print outdoor banners and use Pigment Ink. If you just got to use indoors, you use Dye Ink.

Another thing is the dye by itself is dry. When you get it wet, it's going to run. But it's not the end of the world. If by accident-- If I look at that document, you accidentally pour coffee on it. It's not a big problem. Let's get them wet.

You can see the Dye Ink has started running. [silence] By the way, we're using Windex. You can see the Pigment Ink is still pretty straightforward. The Dye Ink, and it runs a little bit. If you pour coffee, you just wipe it up and clean it, and you still can see the letters. It's not like when you get it wet. You're going to get a blank sheet of paper. We're just going to hang it to dry.

All pages are almost dry. You can see for the Pigment Ink. There's no running offat all. For the Dye Ink, it is not that horrible. Every line here, everything is still pretty straightforward. The Sharpie runs a lot more than Dye Ink. Pigment Ink and Dye Ink are not that much different. My concern is whether I use it indoors or outdoors. Even outdoors, the Dye Ink will not be that bad. Eventually going to fade, but it's not going to disappear like a blank page of the paper. It's up to you whatever you want to use.

By the way, supposedly, the Pigment Ink can last a lot longer. It's like 120 years, and the Dye Ink lasts 40 to 80 years. I hope I can live to see this page fade. Another thing is if you know the Iris printer that all the museums used to reproduce their artworks, those are printed on Dye Ink. If the museum is not concerned, then why should I worry. If I can use it as a sharpie, why don't I use dye? It's always up to you.