Have you considered anything to do with ripping the printer apart to make a larger print area? ie. Replacing all the shafts with longer shafts and the drive system for the ink head with a longer belt/chain and longer tubes? I'm very interested in getting a printer similar to yours and making the same modifications but don't go know how to go about updating the programming of the printer. The hardware isn't too difficult (other than the paper will be heavier as it's wider and coming off a roll).

My plan had been to get a wide format printer to start with for the next phase. I do not know what you could do without making your own drivers and control board. That's beyond the scope of what I know I can accomplish for now to be honest!

Do not drink. Not Kool-aid. Taste very bad. Did you empirically verify that last claim? 😁

Just kidding. Good to hear it's still pumpin' strong. 👍👍👍

Do not want to verify that last claim to be sure. Someone who doesn't value their life or current tongue color may indeed verify that independently, however they would be doing so at their own risk and without my permission.

This project was a primer for me to get my foot in the door of modifying inkjet printers  and provide a useful thing in the process.

A long term goal for my hackerspace is going to be to try and build up a budget (meaning CHEAP!, like less than $100 in the thing when a modified supposedly turnkey <HAH!> printer from China goes for $2,000+ US) flatbed DTG (Direct To Garment) printer for shirts or whatever else.

Almost all of them I see from china use special ink (generally UV curing) and CISS systems to dispense it. They also often use a piece of software known as a RIP to do fancy things like be able to print on black t-shirts by first printing and curing a white layer so the other colors can then be printed, and have some magic to help fool the printer into thinking that everything is normal, when in fact it's whole paperfeed mechanism has been replaced with other electronics and stuff. This also means that there has to be a head that used to dispense a different color to repurpose for that use (so a 4 color printer will not cut it for DTG use for an instance) 

So far the main obstacle is getting a printer that functions and is cheap enough for me to not care about what happens if the project fails. I mean a lot of things have to go right for it to work, I'd rather wash my hands of it should it turn into a disaster. Though my hands could be quite stained to be honest, and that ink isn't easy to get off!

The model I wish to modify shows up from time to time at thrift shops, however so far all 5 I've seen so far either have super clogged nozzles, physically broken parts that prevent them from working, or have had a botched attempt at repair/refilling ink carts which has left it unusable and also covered with ink in all the wrong places(yuck!).

Looking forward to seeing that project.

Looking forward to it as well. Long term in this case probably means at least a year away if not more. I've decided to be at the mercy of parts acquisition. Should be interesting to see also if anyone tackles it and documents it before I can get to it. Many who have started on this journey offer their work as "open" or "free" and then you find out you have to send money to their paypal for blueprints. The boards you can get for certain printers that take place of the paper feeder/detection often have chips that have been ground down to prevent reverse engineering. Reminds me of the original reprap days!

Wanted to post an update, 02/16/2020, the printer is still going strong, no clogged heads or malfunction yet.

Still no clogs, 07/06/2020, and it still is working well, however it has not had much use since March for obvious reasons, and the world has very much turned on it's head since I last thought about this.  Hope everyone stays safe and informed throughout this thing.

Where did you purchase your ciss kit? I'm fed up with Canon. My printer cannot reliably feed paper without shifting the angle. Attempting to do full page cutouts of stickers on my cricut and it never works. Also, always scales my prints even with everything turned off. I've read epson printers are the easiest to modify. Canon heads are not capable of adding abciss if trying to use sublimation inks because they heat as they apply. 

Thanks for posting this project. Knowing the steps and gotchas is useful in case I ever do anything like this.

But these days I hardly print anything on my mono laser even, maybe 5 pages a month. Currently they are mostly schematics to follow while assembling on breadboard. In the past they were things like job contracts where I printed the Sign Here page, signed, scanned and replaced the page in the PDF file. Of late I only had to sign the electronic document on my mobile phone.

Yeah, I looked for an excuse to build one of these for a while. Since we use our printers a lot at my hackerspace, I figured this would be the closest I could get to the environment one of these would be required in to keep costs down! We need an inkjet because when we tried to bind books with our color laser, we got page to page toner transfer when things were pressed together. Not ideal for a book!

>page to page toner transfer when things were pressed together

Useful to know, thanks!

@Mike Szczys  It was great seeing you too! I had a heck of a lot of fun at Supercon and intend to be there next year, I'll try to bring something like I bring to Defcon this time around.

@Dan Maloney They are still CMYK, this has Light Cyan and Light Magenta alongside the regular C M Y and K. It's something that happens a lot in photo printers.

Come to think of it, I've seen large-format plotters with a rainbow of ink cartridges too. Guess it makes sense, and cool that you found a way to supply ink in bulk.

Hey, it was great seeing you at Supercon this year! 

This is the first I've heard of a continuous ink supply, makes a lot more sense than tiny catridges when the printer gets heavy use.

So the original printer was RGB and CMYK? Sounds like a scheme by Epson to maximize profits from cartridge sales. I like how you worked around that - stick it to the man!

A lot of photo printers have more than 4 colors, especially professional inkjet units. In this case what you are looking at is still CMYK, but it has both light cyan and light magenta as well as the regular colors. The reasoning I was told by a printer person was that you can put more dots per inch of light magenta (or light cyan) as opposed to regular or vivid magenta when you want a certain lighter color color. Coverage is better, so your picture will look better as opposed to using say half toning on a full strength color. (More dots is more better!) Hope that clears it up!