Fixing a CarbColords L8058 DTF Printer – Review. Should I buy a secondhand CarbColords printer? The question that everyone has been pondering I’m sure. Well, certainly me. I really wanted to add DTF printing to our capabilities for production of various products. We’ve used a few print on demand services for them in the past but really want our own.
As you’ll probably know cheap DTF printers aren’t really a thing. Well, not my idea of cheap. There’s a variety of similar looking ones available for around the £2000 mark, give or take a bit. And they all appear to be very heavily based on large manufacturers, in the case of the CarbColords, Epson.
This model retails at £1600, so it’s jolly expensive. I picked up mine for £130 delivered, got to be worth a go right? It was advertised as not working (fair enough) and arrived in bits in a box. No grumbles there.
Let’s get to it. The first obvious part to not work is this, the capping station and waste ink pump. It should pop up and down to cover the printhead when not printing and other vital maintenance. It doesn’t, no idea how long it’s not worked for. This in turn has led to ink in the printhead drying up and blocking it.
I took out the capping station, promptly bought a new one from AliExpress for £13 then started pondering. It became clear that the motor that should be driving it wasn’t engaging. I genuinely can’t work out how it should be set up, but I added this bolt and washer combo to get all the gears meshing. Yay, it now worked! It goes up, down, pulls ink through the printhead, just as it should.
Excitedly, I go on to do a test print. Then another. Then a head clean, then a test print. See where this is going? I manage to get most colours working, but barely any white. White ink? Yes, that’s one thing DTF has over sublimation. It is however a bit evil and loves to clog, which it has in my case, well and truly.
To cut a long story short, I took the print head off. Squirted water and very strong head cleaner through it. Put the head in an ultrasonic cleaner. All looked like the white ink was being removed, but other than a marginal improvement, only around a third of the nozzles are now working.
So, sadly – new printhead time! Now, do I spend £30 on one from eBay/China, or do I spend £300 on a less questionable source…… that’s where I am at, I can’t decide! Is my printer worth spending that sort of money on? Read on for a few more general thoughts on it.
If you don’t know, you’ll soon learn, that DTF printers like to be maintained regularly, like really regularly. Do not buy one of these types at all if you don’t want to commit to this. There you go. I’ve said it and put a few of you off.
It needs to be left plugged in all the time. It has an add on white ink tank which gets automatically stirred with a very noisy stirring paddle every 15 minutes. It ideally needs to print something daily. You must click clean printhead daily. You must add special solutions to it with a syringe regularly to help persuade it to keep going.
None of the above is too taxing, but don’t forget to do it, and don’t keep it somewhere where the noise will bother you.
What it should produce, is a DTF transfer, which you then apply to a product, leaving a very professional finish. You don’t get a funny looking backing, like the printable iron on transfers for example. Once printed on the special film, you then immediately give it a shower/bath in white powder! This sticks to your design. Then you take your freshly powdered design and bake it in a DTF oven for a few minutes. Only then is it ready for applying to your fabric, t-shirt, hat, tote bag, etc.
So it has a few stages to it, this process. The DTF film is on a roll, but you still need to chop lengths of it off, powder and bake it before you are good to go.
Could you run a business with this? Yes. You probably could, but I fancy just a small business. The ever present threat of your nearly £2k investment breaking and needing knowledge and money thrown at it is there. It feels like a lot of money to spend for a not entirely well designed and thoroughly temperamental machine.
I don’t mind tinkering with my 2nd hand machine and throwing cheap parts at it from AliExpress to see what happens. I’d be much less inclined if I had bought new. Incidentally, I reached out to CarbColords support with a quick question on the capping station and didn’t receive any response at all.
