How to make a refillable sponge cartridge from HP 67 OEM

Today we are going to make a refillable sponge cartridge with HP 67. In the previous two videos, we did how to refill it (click here), and we did how to select the cartridge and avoid the E-01 error (click here). Today we're going to use this kit  (click here) from BCH to replace all the sponges inside the cartridge. If you remember from the previous video, the problem with the O EM cartridge is the sponge fatigue; although you can refill it, you can only print 20 to 30 pages after a while, the sponge is not good anymore. This kit has a transparent cover, one for color, one for black, four sponges, three for the tricolor, and one for the black. Also included this priming syringe. You might need it. You may not. It is in the kit but is optional to use. It doesn't have any syringes, you get a syringe from when you were buying the ink, but it does have four needles.

Click here for the kit

I'll put the link to the kit above. The superglue is for the car. If you want a glue that covers airtight, which is optional, I suggest you not to, because if you do not glue that airtight, you can remove the sponge later and use the sponge at another set of cartridges. Okay, you may have heard the spongeless, which means you don't need a sponge, for the spongeless is easier to do. Still, you have to glue the cover airtight for the spongeless, which means you have to buy another set for each cartridge, but you can reuse it again and again and pass it on to your children and pass it on to your children on to your grandchildren, you buy it once.

Again, this is the hardest one to do. It would help if you had a sharp blade. I suggest I use the utility knife and a brand new edge, and also, you'll need considerable arm strength. The first thing is you'll find this seam and put your sharp blade on it and start using your arm to move up-down and push down, be careful. If you feel lose a finger, I don't believe that it's my fault. Once you think a corner is compromised and change it to another corner, you rotate it and work on all corners. Why don't you try this at home? If you can open it, you'll buy the kit. If you cannot, you can throw the cartridge away; you were going to throw the cartridge away anyway. Okay, you're going to see this tiny little sponge. Guess how much ink can hold. Also, you can see there's a wall around it, and that's because HP doesn't want you to put more ink in it. Remember, the black color is easy to get glued backward, and you should take a mental picture, where's the front, where's the back before you'll put the black cover back. This is a regular size 67, and you can see HP didn't even bother to fill up the sponge. It only filled half full. You're paying $15 for that three drops of ink.

Let's take a look over for the 67 XL, you can see the HP gave you a lot more ink in XL, and the sponge is a bit more full, and the sponge is a little bit larger than the regular sponge, we got a comparison of the regular sponge and XL sponge. Over to this goal, we're going to use this granddaddy sponge. Let's see how much ink we can get for $15 from BCH, we go to bchtechnologies.com, and we go to ink for printers and ink refilling for HP and select all dye ink. I know the original HP is pigment ink but based on my experience, use the dye ink on this cartridge. We go to, I'm going to suggest you get this kit, it has six bottles, each bottle has 100 mils, and HP only gave you 3.5 mil each cartridge, each bottle will be 20 refills.

Again I'm going to put a link above so he can find it. Okay, the next task is to remove this wall so we can arrange a sponge in, I think the best way to do it is to have a CNC machine and program it, and I already do it; use the plier nip. When you do it that there's a filter underneath, do not break that filter. If you die that filter, the cartridge will go wrong. It gets more complex and complicated when you reach the bottom; sometimes, I use a stove to heat a screwdriver and use the screwdriver to do the bottom.

Another way is using rotary 2; I'm using this cheap one from Amazon, which is $21 with free delivery. It has this part I find that is useful. I'm going to put the link here. If you want it, you can get it from Amazon. You don't have to make it flat. Remember, if you press the sponge down, the sponge has good contact with the filter, and that's good enough. Now wash the cartridge with distilled water, do not use tap water or mineral water. You can get distilled water from any grocery store. My region is 85 cents for a gallon.

Now it's the fun part. The sponge is made more significant than the cartridge. That's intentional. You have to squeeze it and make that snuggly. Press it down harder if you didn't make the bottom flat. Then now the cover, make sure to compare the original body and then make sure which is up and down. We're not going to glue the cover-up airtight today. Just make sure you put the covering in the right way, get a piece of tape, and tape it. If you care, cover those sharp needles, fill a syringe, then use those pointed needles.

Today, I will show you that if you don't have sharp needles, they can still penetrate the sponge if you have blunt needles. However, do it with an angle so you can make sure it doesn't puncture through the filter. You can squeeze as much ink as you want until you see the ink comes up. For the color, ink is the same chore, cut and rotate, cut and turn. You can see there's not much difference in the sponge size between the regular and XL. Remember the color sequence, the left is yellow, and the right is blue, and the top one is magenta. Magenta is a little bit special see the filter is high, so you need to push down the sponge a little bit more when you install.

We need to remove the middle divider for the yellow and the cyan, and for magenta, we need to move the left and the right wall. After you're done, clean with distilled water and also check the magenta. Make sure the magenta is down. For all the three colors, the one that you have most probably maybe magenta because your sponge is not down.

How about it before and after the picture? Again we're going to secure the top with tape rather than glue with airtight; We're going to use video to tape it. Again go in with the angle, do not penetrate the filter. Now we need to prime it. If we glue it airtight, we can use this priming syringe to push some air in each chamber, and the ink will be primed coming out. Because we didn't glue airtight, we'll need a priming kit. For starters, you can go search for EZ30 and go to this one, the First-time Refill kit for HP, and it's called EZ30-T. And this one you can have all four colors. You have a complete priming kit.

The ink volume is 30 ml each color. The ink I recommend earlier, this ink doesn't have a priming kit, it only has ink, but it has lots of ink. You get 100 ml each for six bottles. If you want to buy the priming kit by itself, you go to Accessories, Priming Clip and Syringe, and you can buy this priming kit by itself. It's like we have promotions, we have sales, so I don't know when you look at this which way is more manageable. The EZ30-T has everything you need, but if you buy them separately, you may get a better deal.

The priming kit will have two rubber pads. One is more prolonged. One is shorter. The shorter one is for the tri-color cartridge. Just line it up, push it in, and draw some ink from the bottom. For the tri-color, the ink coming out should be black because you combined all three colors. You can see this is a little bit greenish. That means your magenta is not good. Testing it has a wet paper towel and press it down. You can see there's no red color coming out.

Most likely, you didn't make the bottom flush, so the sponge doesn't have good contact with the base. Let's try this. I'll put more ink on it. I'll put more magenta ink in it. On the left is the new ink, which is a lot more black than on the right, green.

And our paper towel test looks okay. You got all three colors. And now we're going to change the pad and do the black. Do not contact me if you cannot put the black on. This clip is the correct clip. If it doesn't fit real tight, it won't have any vacuum. If you put it like this, and you can see that they all lined up, they lined up in the middle, push down and then push forward. And that should work.

I still get people to contact me. You say they cannot push it in, and the clip is too small. I don't know how to give a better suggestion other than put it in the middle, push it down and push forward. If you do have a good vacuum, and you don't feel it's sucking, then move the cartridge a little bit around until you get a good vacuum. The black looks good.

Let's take it for a spin, and there's no E01 error. That's great. And watch my previous video, which I'm going to put in the description. If you have an E01 error check out that video, and you can understand what it is.

I'll put the direction to Apple China restaurant in the description. There's a fake restaurant, a fake Apple China restaurant in Greensboro. If you use Google Map, it will lead you to the fake one. So I'm going to put the real one in the description. The first page looks delicious. But if we print a couple more pages, you're going to see the red color is gone.

Usually, it means you need to prime it a little bit more, or your sponge is not down enough to touch the filter. So we'll leave it like this, we don't do anything for half an hour, and then we'll come back and print another page.

Suppose the sponge touches the filter, and the color should come down now. You can see it's still yellow. It's hard to tell if your cartridge is clogged, air clogged, or the sponge needs to come down a little bit. We'll leave the cartridge in the printer for a day. Then we'll come back the second day and start printing. If we have any problem with ink pressure, it should be balanced the second day. If the printer is still wrong, we need to adjust the sponge.

It looks pretty good for the first few thirds of the page, and then you can see it start getting yellow again. We need to adjust the sponge. I'll use a needle to press the sponge down a little bit. I'm not adding ink; I'm just pushing the sponge down. If this doesn't work, I'm going to take the cover off and grind down the divider a bit more, then make it a little bit lower so the sponge can come down a little bit. However, this seems to fix the problem.