Free to a Good Home

     I am extremely handy.  Unfortunately, I am also extremely eager to get a job done.  The combination of these traits is sometimes a recipe for disaster.  Yesterday, I got a message from my aged Epson RX500 printer that said, "Parts inside the printer have reached the end of their service life."  Never believe a message from Epson.  They are notorious for warning customers to buy new stuff when the old stuff will soldier on for ages.  I started researching the cause of the warning and the fix.
     I learned that printers discharge ink during start up and cleaning cycles.  The excess ink is channeled to an absorbent pad in the bottom of the printer.  Once the pad is full, it can overflow and leak outside the unit.  Beside making a mess, leakage could do some real damage.  Epson has determined a specific number of pages they will allow their units to crank out.  When the page counter reaches the magic number, the printer shuts itself down.  There are free programs "out there" for resetting the counter and restarting your printer.  A reset is only half the fix.  The pad also has to be cleaned or replaced.
     This is where I got into trouble.  I looked inside my printer, in the area of the print head, and saw a reservoir of ink with a spongy pad.  I assumed this was the pad that should be cleaned, so I grabbed it with a pair of chop sticks (damn, the Asian friend who taught me to eat with those things).  As soon as I grabbed the pad, it broken into pieces.  Also, some plastic stuff, that edged the little well in which the pad sat, had come loose.  I picked it up as neatly as I would pick up a single grain of rice.  Then I swabbed out the reservoir with paper towels until it was as dry as a bone.  That was when I started to wonder if I was "cleaning" in the proper place.
     I googled "where is the ink overflow pad located in Epson printers?"  It isn't near the print head.  It's on the floor of the unit, accessible (barely) by going through the back of the device.  Instead of cleaning the overflow pad, I had destroyed the capping unit that keeps the print head moist.  Oops!  I wish I had found this tutorial sooner:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwylF5dHgY4  This YouTube video demonstrates how to extend the ink overflow tube with aquarium supplies. Once the tube is lengthened, it is attached to a plastic bottle.  That bottle can be emptied, and the page counter can be reset on into perpetuity.  If I hadn't been in such a hurry, I might have been able to rig up my printer to spue ink harmlessly forever.
     My Epson 500 is headed for proper recycling .  The really annoying part of this whole episode is  I have lots of replacement ink cartridges stashed away.  Guaranteed, they won't be compatible with any printer on the market these days.  If anybody out there could use some T048 series cartridges, they are free to a good home.  Contact me at happyinhainesport@yahoo.com.