Make a DIY Refillable Sponge Cartridge for Your Printer!

Here's how to make a refillable sponge cartridge for HP. HP uses a tiny sponge for regular or starter HP cartridges, and you can see it here. Our goal is to remove this little sponge and replace it with a larger one to hold more ink. First, let's go over what you need. You need a MOD Kit by go to bchtechnologies.com and go to MOD Kit and For HP. Scroll down, and you can find the sponge MOD Kit.

Other things you will need are sandpaper, a heavy-duty utility knife, some rubber bands, super glue, and a long nose plier. For the ink, we suggest KD600X. Which you'll go to bchtechnologies.com. Go to Refill Ink, Refill Ink for HP. On the left hand, you're going to see a filter, and you click 600 ml. That's the total amount of ink. Then you'll scroll down and find a 4-Color ink. It has three black ink and CMY. There's lots of ink.

The first thing we do is gather the cartridge protected. We use a piece of tape. The sticky parts towards us and the non-sticky part towards the cartridge so the cartridge printhead will not contact the glue. Then we get a second piece of tape, place it on the top of the cartridge, and press it down. Then we'll get the third piece of tape and put it down the electronic ribbon. The third piece is in case some super glue dripped down, and we don't want the super glue to get on the electronic tape. If you wish, you can slowly bend the tape a little and make a little tab, so it'll be easier for you to remove it. You can pull it and remove it.

Once the border is open, we'll work on the other sides. Once all the edges are loosened, the cap can be taken off and expose to the sponge inside. The next step is not very hard, but it requires lots of patience. HP cartridges have internal walls to limit cartridge capacity. We'll use a long plier to remove the barrier. By doing so, we'll increase the cartridge ink capacity to the XL level. We remove the sponge first. Then we'll use a long nose plier, break the wall down piece by piece. Do it very carefully. Do not damage the filter underneath.

This is what the final result will look like. You don't need to remove all the walls down. To make sure, we'll press the sponge down. The sponge can touch the filter. Now, we do the same thing for the color ones. Step one, get the cartridge protected—step two, cutting.

For color one, we need to get rid of those four walls.

We'll use our 150-grade sandpaper for sanding the top of the cartridge evenly and smoothly in the next step. We'll then use a knife to remove the debris. We'll now whip or blow out the debris from the cartridge, and then we just put the cartridge under running water and clean it.

You can use regular tap water to do it. After the cartridge is clean, we can reinsert the sponge and press it down. We don't need to glue it air-tight, so we'll just put a little bit of superglue and secure the top. For the colors, one of the sponges is a little bit larger than the other two. So that larger one is going to be on the top.

We'll now inject the ink. We're going to push the needle halfway down into the sponge and then pull it out a little bit so that we can release the ink. Please do not press it down too hard so the needle may penetrate the filter underneath. We keep injecting ink, and here we can see the color comes up.

We'll do the same for the color one.

Now, we can take the protective tape off. Now, we're going to show you how to do unclogging. If you have a printer working, which I mean is printing, but that printout is blank, or the printout is striped, that means it's clogged. Which means you have an air bubble underneath. If you have a priming clip, you can do it like this, put it on the clip and draw some ink from the bottom. The air bubbles will be drawn out with the ink.

I know not everybody has a priming clip. If you don't have one, let me show you an alternative. You get a piece of paper towel, add the white paper towel with some water. Then get a vacuum cleaner and suck underneath. Once they're unclogged, you can see lots of ink coming out.

Now, I can put it in the printer for a test print. You can see the first printout is still clogged. What we did is we used the printer's built-in function to clean it twice. After we clean it twice, we'll take it out, and we use a vacuum to suck a little bit more. Eventually, we get it in working.

Your refill cartridge will not show an accurate ink level. It will show the old ink level, like the black one, or show no ink at all. All the warning is about a low ink level or cartridge ink depleted, whenever you see an error window pops up click okay, they will dismiss the message and keep printing. You're okay as long as this ink indicator light is not flashing. Well, it has flashed. There's something wrong with your cartridge. Maybe you broke the filter, or perhaps there is something simple as there is some ink splash on the ribbon.

It would be best if you wiped it dry. Take the cartridge out and reinsert it a couple of times. If this light is still flashing, then the cartridge is permanently damaged. Since the ink level indicator is no longer working for us. We need a keep our eye on the printout quality. If I see a printout is a missing color, or with these stripes, we know the ink ran out. We need them to add more ink. Let me show you how this works in real life.

We printed more black pages. Now we use up all the black and use up all the color. The printer thinks there's no ink in the cartridge, but I click okay when it's a low ink. I keep printing. We're going to put a green separator forever every 50 pages printed, and I can show you how many pages it can print with this refilled cartridge. This will print more than regular HP because we use a larger sponge than the regular sponge.

Now, you can see the color has run out.

We went back and checked what time do colors run out.

We print out at 269 pages. So the next thing we do is we can take the cartridge out and add the ink back in and do some unclogging if necessary. Then we will get back printing.