A while ago, the team at BCH Technologies demonstrated how to make a spongeless refillable cartridge. We used old cartridges for our example, which caused us to worry that they would clog. As a preemptive measure, we blew one milliliter of air into each of the cartridge chambers, attempting to solve a problem we hadn’t confirmed existed.

Unfortunately, this caused the yellow cartridge chamber to become overpressured. We tried to correct this by blowing air into the other chambers, but that only worsened things. The more we tried, the worse it got.

Walk away

Eventually, we left the cartridge in the printer for a while and simply hoped for the best. When we returned and tested it the next day, the cartridges printed just fine without any effort. Sometimes the best solution to these problems is to walk away and let things sort themselves out. The moral of the story here is not to blow air into the cartridge unless you are certain your cartridge has a clog.

Next, we tested the number of pages the cartridge could print on a single refill. Since the goal was to see if the spongeless cartridge could print more pages than the refillable cartridge with a sponge, we set the pages printed by the sponge cartridge to the left as a comparison.

Refill

After the first pack of 500 pages was gone, I decided it was time for the refill. Without blowing any air into the cartridge this time, we reinstalled it into the printer, and it printed without any issues. In the end, the spongeless cartridges could print almost twice as much as the refillable cartridges with a sponge.

I hope this blog helped! Remember to follow me on YouTube at Kevin at BCH, and check out the video version of this post by clicking here.