Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "David J. Bookbinder" 
<david_bookbinder@s...> wrote:
> On my 785EPX, I've found that making sure, when the printer is idle 
or off,
> that the paper thickness lever is set to the "0" setting, rather 
than the
> "+" setting has greatly reduced the number of clogs. I turn it off 
at night,
> and that seems sufficient. I, too, was unable to see any movement of 
the cap
> or printhead when it went from "parked" to "off."
> 
> - David
> 

This is an interesting theory. I have some questions:

1) Is this something you have observed and recorded in some way, 
removing other variables such as time interval between prints, 
humidity changes, etc? If so, can you give a rough percentage of 
getting a clear nozzle in both "+" and "0" positions, that is, can you 
say that if left in "0" position, you tend to get clogs only "x % of 
time" vs "y%" of time in "+" position? You may also have to account 
for alignment operations, which whatever position the lever is in, 
move the head up and down relative to it's old position. For example, 
a good test might be to align the printer with very thin paper on "0" 
and compare with the printer aligned to a thick paper on "0". Then 
repeat on "+" , yada, yada.

2) How then would you account for the large amount of travel possible 
in the parking pad, being spring loaded to the large extent that it 
is (I'm going by the 1160 and the 1280)? My guess (based on my ex-HP 
mech eng experience) is that Epson engineers would design the printer 
to take up head height variation due to lever position with this 
design, as they could not guarentee where customers would leave the 
lever or paper thickness alignment, and they wouldn't want warranty 
problems. And it looks to me as if one function of the springs may be 
to do exactly this.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I would just like to carry the 
supposition further. I often leave the lever at "+", and would like 
some clarification before I go off and design experiments around this 
idea.
Thanks for the notion,
Jim H.