Good grief! That's one big mess for sure.
I still have my Epson MX-80 F/T with Graftrax III dot matrix from like 1980. That, and the Grappler+ interface card from Orange Micro, and a Practical Peripherals MicroBuffer. And all the original accessories like dust lid, parallel cable, owner’s manual, AC power cord, and other odds & ends. This was used exclusively on my Apple II computer, which I also still have. The very same one I had hooked up to a home-built radio telescope to listen in on the Voyager Spacecraft (another story for another time).
And while I have not powered the MX-80 up in 10 years, I have little doubt it would still work. The ribbon is in a plastic baggie and seemingly still wet. These printers were tougher than tanks and they were unstoppable. Noise included!
I used that thing and pounded on it even more. Never stopped working. And when we ran out of ink or when the ribbon dried up - well, we took off the top of the cartridge and "refilled" it with WD40.
That's right! WD40. The premise behind it and why it worked was because the WD40 would act to redistribute and wick the ink from the virgin untouched edges of the ribbon in to the center where the pintles impacted. This was good for couple more rounds of printing. And eventually the ribbon would get fuzzy and ratty, what with the constant pounding in one area all the time. It would wear out a thin 9-pin-wide portion of “strip” or ribbon. But never fear! We had a solution for that too.
When the ribbon wore out we'd flip it 180 and use dad's power drill to wind it back into the cartridge. This would present a fresh new surface.
Sometimes a cartridge would just simply get totally depleted and WD40 didn’t have anything to wick. So we used fountain pen ink. And more surprisingly ink from ballpoint pens. Erasermates, Parkers, Bics.. I remember "cruising" around on our bikes collecting pens that got dropped or run over by cars. Or we'd just plain steal them. Nobody was the wiser. You can have 10 pens in a room, and not find a single one in a timely fashion.
How do you like them apples? Free ink! Available from anywhere. We’d cut the ends off the pens and blow the ink into the ribbon. Spray some WD40 and we were back in business. One of my early summer jobs was visiting all the local businesses and “refilling” their ribbon cartridges for like $2.
One time we were out sitting in the driveway and I was blowing ink and the cops rolled by and stopped. We had the typical high-school-dropout stoner music going. Pink Floyd or Deep Purple. You know, the stuff losers & druggies get into. They thought I was snorting something anyhow. So I explained what was going on. Later he came back with a small list of potential customers. Maybe 4 or 5 I think. How cool was that?? I made enough money to get more hardware upgrades for my Apple 2 series computers. I remember getting a carton of Maxell floppies and a clock card and a joystick extension cable and 64k/80column card that fall, just prior to thanksgiving week break. Fantastic!
