Chuck,
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The ink you referred to leaking from inkjet printers was probably due to overloading the trapping material in the bottom. What comes directly out of the cartridges doesn't leak, and isn't accidental. It's just the dirty little secret of inkjet printing, that the head cleaning uses up a helluva lot of ink. The ink in the nozzles is continually drying out when idle, so the machines automatically waste some every so often or on demand if needed. There are various covering mechanisms to slow the drying, but they can only do so much. The waste ink ends up dumped into pads of absorbent material down in the bowels of the printer, to ultimately be thrown away with the rest. After enough time, the pads get totally saturated with ink, and it starts to flow around in the bottom of the machine before it can sufficiently dry out. I'd venture to say maybe half of all ink is used up on head cleaning, and the rest gets put on paper, less whatever is left unused inside the cartridges when they dry up too much or when the machine is tossed.
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Even the more modern ones like the "ECO-tank" types do it. The ECO thing about them is that you use bulk ink for refilling, so it's cheaper and wastes less plastic on all those ever smaller ink cartridges. They still have to do the head cleaning, and will still use up the ink whether you print or not. I had one of those Epson ones that was really nice. One time after sitting idle for too long, one of the colors got clogged up and it wouldn't print that color. After several tries at regular cleaning, a little of the color would show, but still not right. I found the printer has some kind of super-cleaning mode that you can do if necessary. I ran it, and watched it go through all sorts of cycles. The print quality returned, and I could see a noticeable drop in the reservoirs - of all the colors! So, even though only one color was clogged, it had to waste a bunch of each to do the cleaning. Good thing the ink is relatively cheap.
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Back to the original topic, it's fun to ponder analysis and recipes of inks and such, but what I'd like to see is someone with analytical gear figuring out what's in Deoxit - now there's something much more interesting, at least to me.
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Ed
