How to Make DIY Cartridges for Beginners: PG-240 CL-241 PG-245 CL-246

In this article, we will show any beginner how to make a refillable cartridge. Canon makes these color virgin cartridges. Never been refilled before, so it's the first time, so they call it virgin. Unfortunately, these are non-virgin third-party cartridges, and you can see, Canon makes it, but the people already refilled it.

The first thing I do, is I like to protect the print head. So this is the print head.

That's all where your money is. What I do, is I get a piece of tape, and this is the non-sticky part. I don't want the sticky part to stick to the print head, so I flip backward, and I need to protect the electronic ribbon, so I'm going to start where the ribbon is. At a hole like this, this is the sticky part. I'll get it one more tape here like this. This part is to help protect-- We're going to use superglue, protect the superglue dripping down, and then mess up the electronic ribbon.

You don't want to mess up the electronic ribbon because if it ruins, then you can't use it ever.

I must take it a little bit higher and lower to see if the superglue drip down. It's not going to mess up with the ribbon.

Both sides are protected.

This part has a little hanging tape there. The problem with this is if the superglue dripped down, it'd still get through, so I'll cut this part off.

Re-tape it right below the line.

Some customers tape the entire thing- don't do that. Don't be like them.

Also, non-virgin they have this label here. It's another set of chips. If you peel this off, it becomes this. It's kind of interesting. All it does is they block this so that I will show off the ink for them. This is nasty. I never refill anything this nasty before. Look at that.

If we can refill this, anything can be refilled. Okay, look good. The second thing I like to do is cut this label, so it gives me the model number. Because I have so many models that look the same, so I just put it here. In the future, I can look at this and know which model it is. We can see how they refill it. They drill three holes. It's interesting. This one is the same. I just cut this.

I see the bigger numbers on the bottom, and it's harder to get off, and it splits, so I might go for the top one because it seems to be the one that I want. There we go. I got another one. Sorry. There we go. I got both of them.

The next one is the hardest part of this. I try to explain to people. I don't know why people don't get it. What you do is-- Actually, put it back a little bit. I put it on edge, so I have more room here. What I do is, I find this seam, push the knife in, which I do like this.

The next one is sanding. I usually do not take the sponge out because there are lots of debris after filing. If you compare yours ungrounded, you can see there's a grove.

Now you can see it is flat and smooth.

Another thing is after grinding. There may be something here. You use a razor blade.

What we're going to do is, we're going to fill this whole thing with ink. Then you can print lots more pages—color one. Here we go.

I'm not sure this one can be saved. It looks like the yellow line is leaking. I'll get some water.

Just rinse it out well.

Here we go. Aside from the wet paper but you can still see. This is not to be clean, and you're going to get things everywhere, that's okay. Just make sure you wash well with some soap and try not to wear professional attire because the ink won't come out.

For the first time, you want to practice a little bit. I usually do because you only get one chance to put in. What I like to do is push this edge, and I match this first. I press it down. The harder one is the color one. The color one is the same thing. I push this edge, make it fully line up, and press it down.

Don't spill it. Then hold it and use a rubber band to make it tight to hold it in place for the drying process.

Look, this seal is all solid. Another thing I like to do is plug it so it won't have too many fumes inside.

I'm going to follow my edge. For somebody who doesn't mess with superglue, I'm doing pretty good. All right. Better for a second. If I remember correctly, that's the cyan.

Of course, you can only do for the black one, wait and do for the color one. The color one will be a little bit different. The thing is, you have to glue this.

The T. For it to have enough ink, I pre-glue this T too. So what I do is I do the round the surroundings first.

You're going to have a fume anyway. It just helps a little bit. If you don't like it, you want it clear. Maybe you get something like a blower, blow the air in.

Just don't get air bubbles and have a bubble up.

Leaking from the bottom is a good thing. We don't want to get a clog.

I'm going to start with my red, and the red is the top. Let me clean up a little bit of the ink that spilled out. Put my plug back in. There you go. There's one plug. I don't know if that's sealed.

If it's not sealed, that works. If it's not sealed, you can go back and use the glue, not the superglue, the super glue gel like this.

The gel will seal it.

It'll take a day to seal it, but you can just put it around that.

As long as you seal the middle correctly, the T correctly, the outer edge, you can go back and reseal it. In the inner one, you have to cut the cover off and throw it away.

We leave the cartridge to dry for a couple of hours, ideally overnight, so the glue can be dry. To test if we glued the cover airtight, we can blow air into the air holes. Those white ones, there's a tiny hole in the middle. When we press the syringe in, we're going to see if there's any leaking on the side of the cover. For example, the magenta is leaking air. Then after we test the two other colors, the two different colors are airtight. It's effortless to fix. What we do is, the first thing is you drain the ink out.

You can get the countertop wet, then you add more superglue on edge, and then you can leave it for a couple more hours. [silence] If I blow air into the air hole here, the ink will come out from the bottom. You see anything clogged. It'll blow the clogs away. I'll get one mil for air. [silence] Just a little bit.

I'll get one of these and fill it up with some water.

Just it in there for a couple of hours to dissolve the clog. Another thing to do is-- nothing is coming out, so this is clogged solid. Another thing to do if water doesn't work, what I'll do is get this BCH cleaning solution.

The printer has a function to unclog it. Some printers and we go printing preference, and maintenance and deep cleaning.

We're going to do it twice, then wait two hours, do two more, and see if it works.

We'll take this gut out and unclog it a little bit more. If you see that the one we soaked in is already unclogged.

There's a difference between water and the cartridge cleaning solution.

It did clean out that one that was clogged up there. That one is done.

We're doing the second, current page, and he's stating that it should run it all off the old stuff, and the new stuff should be in there. So, yes, it looks like it already. You could see the BCH, and everything filled out pretty well. You might have to do two test print pages to make sure.

Up here, it will still show the low ink level until it comes to this error. Lots of people ask me, "What do I do? It is still low ink?" Just keep printing until you get this window. Just hold and hold the stop button until the windows go away, and then it will print forever. The bottom line is all good.

Two more pages will be printed to make sure that it shows that it's working right. The test print is here. It should be the same type of yellow coming out now. Let's see. Aside from the shadow, but looks pretty good. It seems a bit dark, though, not so bright. It might just need to be a little bit cleaner. You see that we're printing again to make sure that the cartridge is clean.

You can see the bottom black is new ink now. Everything looks good. Top one, the old color looks good.