Joe,

When the printer is off or not printing the carriage "parks" on the right
side of the printer. When doing this, the carriage positions itself over the
ink catch basin and the cartridge print heads are supposed to be covered by
little rubber pads that raise into position once the carriage parks. It
sounds like the rubber pad for your color cartridge is either missing or not
correctly seating against the print head. If you want to keep the printer
( I can understand why you might not, I maintain roughly a dozen Lexmark
inkjets in my company and curse the day I recommended that we buy them), you
can remove the printer cover and inspect/repair the mechanism that covers
the print heads. There are four screws that you have to remove and the cover
just lifts off. You can then inspect or repair the mechanism relatively
easily. You'll be amazed with how basic the "guts" of the printer are and
you'll then realize why they can basically give these printers away.

Feel free to contact me if you need more details.

Steve Polatas
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Trimarchi" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 7:24 PM
Subject: Lexmark Z51 printer color cartidge always needs cleaning


> I have a Lexmark Z51 printer and the color cartridge always needs
cleaning.
> At first I thought it was a faulty cartridge so pitched it and replaced it
> with a new one. If I don't print in color every 24 hours or so it seems to
> dry out and need cleaning. I remove the cartridge and wipe it with a damp
> paper towel and all seems ok. If I don't print in color for a day I have
to
> do it over again as the color printing will be streaking and not even
close
> to what it should be or will be with a clean printer head. I'm about to
> pitch the whole printer as I find Lexmark cartridges to be extremely
> expensive for the amount of printing they produce. I'm considering
replacing
> with either a Canon or Epson that have 6 or 7 ink cartidges. Before I do
> does anyone have any suggested resolution to this problem.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Joe
>
>
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