How to Refill a Printer Cartridge
Printer ink cartridges can be extremely expensive, especially if you do a lot of printing. If you want to try your hand at refilling ink cartridges, you’ll be saving yourself a bundle and learning a new skill that can help you out many times down the road.
Buy a Printer Cartridge Refill Kit:
The very first step in refilling an ink cartridge is to buy a refill kit. These kits include a bottle of ink, or bottles if you’re refilling a color cartridge, a syringe, and possibly a drill and calibration tool. Don’t worry; the process is much simpler than it might appear looking at the contents of a kit.
Prep Work:
Remove the cartridge from the printer. In a perfect world, it is not yet completely empty. If it still has just a bit of ink inside, the chamber is less likely to be dried up and it won’t clog.
Fill the syringe with the proper amount of ink. The instructions that come with a refill kit can give you instructions on how much ink to actually pull into the syringe. But as a very general guideline, black ink might be 17 ml and color ink is 8ml. Be sure to check your instructions, however, as you do not want to overfill your cartridge or have to repeat the process sooner than necessary.
Insertion:
Drill a small hole at the top of the cartridge. If your kit does not come with a drill, you can use a push pin or small nail. If you are refilling a color ink cartridge, you must put a hole at the top of each color chamber.
Then, slowly put the needle of the syringe into the chamber and very slowly press the plunger. The ink will fill the chamber slowly, and this is ideal. If you press the plunger too hard, the ink will foam and you’ll create pockets of air. Working slowly also lets you see if you are going to overfill the cartridge.
Clean-up
When the ink has been inserted into the cartridge, you can remove the syringe and start cleaning up. Let the cartridge sit and settle for a few hours while you wash out the syringe and let it dry. Then pack it away until you need it again. Any ink that was left in the syringe can be placed back into the bottle for future use.
Once the cartridge has had a chance to settle, insert it back into the printer. You don’t need to block the small hole you drilled. Insert the ink and let the printer run through calibration and print a few test and alignment pages before printing any of your own documents. Keep running a cleaning cycle if there are gaps in the ink flow.
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