Monday morning, 7:40. The VG2 has been off since Saturday noon. You load a roll of banner, send a test print, and the white band comes out half striped. The first instinct is a new printhead. Before you price one, open the left service door and look at the four parts sitting between the ink pouch and the nozzle plate. On a TrueVIS VG2 that is the entire wear list: cap top, damper, wiper, cleaner pad. Three of them cost a fraction of a head, and only the damper has to match your ink set. Work through them in that order and most white ink failures end at the cap top instead of the head. All four numbers are listed below, each with the test that proves it is the bad part. What follows is how to tell which one is actually finished, what the Roland numbers are, and the manual cleaning sequence the automatic sleep cycle will never do for you.

The Four Parts on the Ink Path and What Each One Leaves Behind

Ink leaves the pouch tray, crosses a damper, passes the nozzle plate, and lands on media held down by suction. Everything on that route that wears out is on this short list. Learn the signature of each and you stop guessing at the head.

Cap top, Roland 6000004658

This is the rubber cup that rises under the head when the carriage parks. Its only job is to seal the nozzle plate so ink cannot dry overnight. Roland's own part listings put it on a 6 to 12 month cycle, and that number is a calendar guess rather than a measurement. A two shift shop sits at the early end, a shop printing twice a week stretches it.

The signature is easy to read. The test print looks clean right after a cleaning, then drops nozzles within an hour of sitting. The seal is leaking air, not losing nozzles. Pull the cap and look at the black rubber lip. Flattened, glazed, or crusted with dried ink, it will never seal again no matter how much cleaner you put on it.

The current number is 6000004658 and it supersedes 6000002332. Both still appear on parts sites. The new one covers VG, VG2, VG3 in 540 and 640, plus SG and SG2 in 300 and 540. Confirm against your serial plate anyway, because resellers relabel listings constantly.

Damper, Roland 1000025142

The damper sits on the carriage between the ink line and the head. It holds a small reservoir, smooths pressure pulses, and traps air before it reaches the nozzles. The Roland number is 1000025142, ASSY DAMPER DOUBLE CIR 3 CG2075, covering VG, VG2, VG3 and the LO-300-F2.

DOUBLE CIR is the part worth reading twice. It means the double circulation version, built to keep white and metallic ink moving through its own loop. Fit the single circulation damper to a white machine and the white settles inside the reservoir, where no cleaning cycle reaches.

To test one, hold it against a light. A small bubble that clears after two normal cleanings is fine, but a bubble that stays, or a chamber that never fills, means the mesh is restricted. The other sign is banding at high coverage, when the head asks for more ink than the damper can pass.

Wiper, Roland 1000014754

The wiper is the rubber blade that sweeps the nozzle plate after each cleaning and pushes loosened ink into the cap. It is the cheapest part here and the quietest to fail. Roland lists 1000014754 for VG, VG2, VG3 in 540 and 640, plus SG.

Check the edge with a light behind it. A healthy wiper is straight and sharp. A tired one looks fuzzy, has a nick you can feel with a fingernail, or has curled away so it wipes air instead of ink. The print symptom is a faint line across the plate, a streak at the top of the first job that clears after two or three passes.

Cleaner pad, Roland 1000014464

This is the felt pad the head parks against, and the part most shops forget to buy. Roland sells one per pack and notes that a TrueVIS machine takes three. Order three, not one.

A pad that is dark all the way through on the face that meets the head is saturated. Past that point it stops absorbing and starts smearing loosened ink back onto the plate. There is no cleaning it back to life. Soaking it in cleaning liquid makes it worse, because the felt sheds fibers onto the plate.

White Ink Resets the Whole Schedule

Everything in the previous section runs on a slower clock when white is in the machine. White pigment is heavy. It settles in the tray, in the line, and in the damper, and once it packs down it does not come back with a normal cleaning.

The VG2 manual is unusually precise about this, which tells you how often it goes wrong. Pull only the pouch tray for white, shake it horizontally with a stroke of about 5 cm from each end, 50 times, roughly 20 seconds, then put it straight back. Do this before the first job of the day, every day. Do it once a week even if white has not been touched all week.

Four rules come attached to that instruction, and each one exists because someone got it wrong. Do not take the pouches out of the tray. Shake the tray with the pouches inside, or the seams will leak. Wipe the mouth of the pouch before you shake, or ink will splatter across the slot. Put the tray back immediately, because leaving the slot open lets air into the ink path. And if white has been sitting for a month, shake it before you do anything else, including a nozzle check.

This is also where DOUBLE CIR earns its name. A white machine circulates ink through the damper and back so the pigment never has a chance to sit still. The circulation command lives under MENU, then SUB MENU, then INK CONTROL, then CIRCULATE INK, and the panel shows a countdown while it runs. Roland's own documentation ties that routine to moving the machine, but the same menu is the fastest way to prove whether the loop is actually moving ink. Run it, then look at the damper window. If the chamber does not refill during circulation, the problem is upstream of the head.

Put the shaking on the same list as turning the heater on. If it happens after the first job, that job already pulled settled pigment into the line, and the cleaning you run to fix the resulting dropout does not put the pigment back into suspension. A hot shop makes it worse, because heat softens the settled layer into a paste that resists the tray motion.

Two practical consequences follow. First, a white machine burns through cap tops faster than a four color machine, because white left in the cap dries harder and pulls the rubber lip out of shape sooner than a solvent color does. Second, the waste tank in the lower right fills while the machine sits idle, because the sleep cycle keeps cleaning. Empty it before a weekend, not after. A tank that overflows during an unattended cleaning cycle puts ink on the floor and, worse, on the carriage rail.

If you run CMYK only, ignore the shaking routine and keep the standard interval. If you run white or metallic, assume every interval in this article is shorter than the label says. That single adjustment prevents most of the calls that start with the words my white stopped printing.

How to Read These Parts Before They Fail

You do not need a service call to check any of this. The order below runs from free to expensive, which is the order a technician would actually work in.

  1. Print a test pattern, then leave the machine parked for one hour and print it again. A pattern that degrades while parked points at the cap top seal, not the head.
  2. Shine a light into the cap with the carriage moved aside. Look at the black rubber lip. Flattened, glazed, or crusted means replace.
  3. Look at the cleaner pad. Dark through the face means replace. Three pads per machine.
  4. Hold the wiper edge against a light. Fuzzy or nicked means replace. It is the cheapest thing on the list, so do not agonize over it.
  5. Hold the damper to a light. A bubble that survives two normal cleanings means replace.
  6. Only now consider the head. If all five checks above pass and the pattern is still bad, the head is a real suspect.

Keep a three line log for two weeks and the schedule builds itself. Write the date, how many nozzles were missing on the first test print, and which part you touched. When the same entry appears three mornings in a row, you have found the failing part without any instrument.

One check costs nothing and reads the seal from the other side. Trigger a cleaning and watch the waste tube at the lower right while the pump runs. You should see a slug of ink move through it. A full cleaning cycle with nothing moving in the tube means the pump is pulling air through a cap that is not sealing, and the cap is the first suspect, not the pump.

One more observation is worth the trouble. Look at where the missing nozzles sit on the test pattern. A dropout that lands in the same block every morning, and clears after one cleaning, is a cap seal problem. A dropout that moves around, or appears in the middle of a long run, is an ink delivery problem and points at the damper. Random dropouts that never clear point at the head itself. Reading the position saves you from replacing the expensive part first, which is the single most common way a shop turns a cheap repair into an expensive one.

Photograph the first test pattern of the day and keep the shots in one phone album. Ten seconds a morning builds a record that no parts seller can argue with, and it catches a slow decline that the eye forgives from one day to the next.

Manual Cleaning, in the Order the Panel Walks You Through

Roland is blunt about this in their own service blog. A machine that has been idle needs manual cleaning before any operation. The sleep mode cleanings keep cycling, but they cannot remove ink that has gummed onto the head, the wiper, and the cap. Skip the manual pass and that dried ink gets pushed onto the nozzle plate by the first automatic cleaning, which is how a machine that was merely idle becomes a machine that needs a head.

  1. Check the waste tank at the lower right first. If it is near full, empty it before you start, or the cleaning you are about to trigger will overflow it.
  2. Start the manual cleaning command from the menu. The panel then walks you through the sequence step by step, so follow the screen rather than this page.
  3. Open the left service door by pulling it down.
  4. Remove the metal flange in the service bay. There is one thumbscrew at the far left top edge. Take that out, then pull the flange toward the front of the machine. It has three tabs, and they only line up one way when you put it back.
  5. Pull the carriage from the right side of the bay into the service area, moving it left until the lower LEDs shine up at all the heads. Move it by hand, slowly. Do not force it past its stop.
  6. Dip a foam tipped swab in the cleaning liquid that came with the machine. Wipe gently around each head until the deposits are gone and you can see bare metal. This is the step where shops ruin heads, so use the foam swab, not a cloth, and do not scrub the nozzle plate itself.
  7. Wipe away any loose dust with a clean dry swab. A black streak on the swab means dust was sitting on the underside of the head, and that dust is what causes the streak on the print.
  8. Push the carriage back to the right, refit the flange with all three tabs in their slots, and replace the thumbscrew. Close the left door until the magnet holds it.
  9. Open the right service door when the panel asks. Wipe each black rubber O-ring that caps a head, then check the wiper for residue and wipe it too. Clear any debris from the bay with a fresh swab.
  10. Close the right door. The automatic cleaning starts on its own, then load media and print a test pattern.

If the pattern still shows missing or deflected nozzles, run a normal cleaning and print again before you touch anything else. If the machine sat for more than a couple of weeks, a medium or powerful cleaning is the correct next move, and it is expected to use more ink. What you should not do is start swapping parts before the manual pass and one normal cleaning are done, because dried ink on a nozzle plate looks exactly like a dead head until it is wiped off.

Setting a Reorder Rhythm Without a Spreadsheet

These four parts do not wear at the same rate, so a single annual order leaves you short on the cheap items and long on the expensive ones. Build the trigger into jobs you already do instead of a calendar date.

Change the cleaner pads when you load the second box of white ink. Change the wiper when you change the pads a second time. Inspect the cap top at every pad change and replace it when the lip looks glazed, which for a two shift shop usually lands somewhere inside the manufacturer's 6 to 12 month window. Replace the damper when a head is replaced, or when a bubble survives two cleanings, whichever comes first. None of these need a tracking sheet. They need to be tied to something you cannot forget.

Know which of these you can fit yourself. A cap top, a wiper, and a set of pads are bench work: under an hour, a screwdriver, and the panel cleaning routine to finish. A damper is a different job. The ink path has to be purged and the head sealed again after the swap, and a mistake there puts ink where it does not belong. If nobody in the shop has done one, book the technician for the first and watch the second.

Shops running both a white machine and a plain CMYK machine should keep the two stocks apart. The cap top and wiper numbers are shared, the intervals are not, and a shared shelf hides that difference. Write the machine on the box in marker.

Buy in small numbers. Rubber and felt age on the shelf, and a cap top that has been in a drawer for three years is not the same part as one made last quarter. Two cap tops and a set of three pads on the shelf is a working stock. Ten of each is money sitting in a drawer, turning hard.

When you do order, quote the number and the machine together, and ask the seller to confirm both. 6000004658 for the cap top, 1000025142 for the damper, 1000014754 for the wiper, 1000014464 for the pad, three per machine. A seller who answers with the superseded cap top number without mentioning it is a seller worth a second question.

Finally, price the downtime, not the part. A cap top is a small line on an invoice. A day of lost production is not. Multiply your hourly output by the hours the machine sits waiting for a part, add the media you scrapped proving the fault, and add the expedited freight you will pay because you needed it yesterday. That number is what decides whether keeping two cap tops on the shelf is expensive or cheap.