How to convert an Epson EcoTank / SuperTank printer into a sublimation printer

Today, we're going to talk about converting an EcoTank to a sublimation printer. Let's get started. You'll need a sublimation ink, of course, and you'll need a syringe. I do not recommend that large syringe with wings, and then you have to use adapters. Do not use this. Use a regular syringe, and that should work fine. You'll need a screwdriver. If you have pigment ink in your printer, I suggest getting a bottle of pigment ink base.

Go to your grocery store and get a bottle of distilled water. Not just purified or mineral water, it must say distilled. If you have an EcoTank, you will most likely have the ink, so that's not the one to worry about. What I'm worried about is the pigment ink. Pigment ink doesn't go into the paper. They lay on top of the paper. Pigment particles are designed to attract each other and form something like cement sticking on top of the paper. Dye ink is designed to penetrate the paper. It's like salt, and everything is fully dissolved, so it's effortless to clean and very easy to get rid of versus pigment.

Let's use a red dot as a pigment. They try to attract each other and form a cement. What you do is you're putting a chemical matrix to allow them to push each other away. Those particles, when in an ink bottle they are suspended inside this chemical matrix. However, if you add something to it, you add a dye ink in it, it doesn't have this matrix. Those particles attract to each other, and therefore it's going to block your printhead.

Therefore, before you add a dye ink to break this matrix, I suggest adding some clear ink base with that matrix and just pushing the particles farther apart and flushing them out of the system. This is optional, you don't have to do this, and you can just put ink again and see what happens. Most of the time, I'll say 80, 90% of the time, the printer will do fine because there is not much ink left there.

Also, the printer nozzle is about 200 times larger than the particles. Imagine you have to have at least 200 of them to bundle it together to block it, so it's a small chance. If you're a person who doesn't like slim risks, you can go to bchtechnologies.com and go to ink for printers and refill ink for Epson and all pigment, and you should find a bottle for clear ink base there. There you go.

How to tell the ink's a pigment or a dye? You can look at it. For the colored ones, you can look at the yellow color. The dye ink's yellow looks like water, yellow water. The pigment yellow looks like mac and cheese. Some printers use dye for the colors and use pigments for the black. You can search and look at your ink color number. Just google it, 502 pigments or dye. If you're not sure, like me, I bought it from Facebook. You don't know what the previous owner did to it. What you can do is put a drop of ink in the water and see what the color turns out. If it turns out purplish, that's probably dye. If it looks like light grey or black, that's pigment.

Let's get started. Pop your printer off, and that white block will lock your cartridge. See that rod? Use your finger to push it forward, or I call it counterclockwise. You will see the lock is released. Now, remove the screw and take the cover off. If you work with Epson, you probably have those giant syringes with spiral connections to the adapter. The syringe is good at sucking ink out of the ink cartridges. For the EcoTank, the opening of the adapter is too small. You can see it's hard to suck anything out of it. The best thing is just a regular syringe with a slip-on connection, or any standard syringe will do the work. I happen to have 50 ml, which makes my life a little bit easier. Where to find those syringes? Of course, bchtechnologies.com. Accessories, syringes, and needles.

When you suck the ink out, make sure you do that very slowly because a membrane holds the ink tank. You don't want to push too hard to break the membrane. I'm doing it at a regular speed. That's how slow it is. If you still have the original Epson ink bottle, you can fill the bottle with whatever you want to use to flush it. In this case, we don't know what the previous owner did to the black. We're going to put some pigment ink base to do the first flush; then, we draw the ink out. For the second flush, use distilled water. Now, again, please fill-up the Epson bottle with sublimation ink and put it in. After that, prime the ink box one more time. Make sure the real ink comes out.

It's easily identified as dye ink for the color, so we do one flush with distilled water. Also, if you're tired of waiting for those bottles to empty, what we do in the shop is we have a piece of tube that's the same diameter, and we squirt a bottle of ink again. Where to find this tube? Of course, bchtechnologies.com. [chuckle] Accessories and tubing. Also, if you do it this way, do not squeeze too hard. Everything inside is a membrane; you want to do it with a limit. Don't forget to prime and do this for the other colors.

After turning it on, we hold the stop button for three seconds to light the printer into the ink charge mode. This will flush out the ink life inside the printhead; then, we'll print some coloring pages. You'll know the sublimation ink is brown; the black is brown, so you can see there's still an ink mixture of real Epson ink and the sublimation ink. We should cancel the print and go back to the computer. Find your printer, then go to the preferences. Inside the preferences, use the built-in function to do hard cleaning.

After cleaning, there's still a little bit of ink left, so what you can do is you can start using the printer. Set the printing mode to be high, so you might still have a little bit of ink showing. If you're unsure if it's clogging or the remaining ink, you can print a nozzle check. If the nozzle check looked perfect and that's the remaining ink, it's not a big problem. Just keep doing it until you get this nicely evenly brownish color.