I hadn't realised that we had non-UK readers who wouldn't understand the reference.
Methylated Spirits is commonly available in the UK (and this is a UK newsgroup!) where it's methanol mixed with purple dye and a little pyridine to make it taste even worse.
Oh. Two newsgroups. I hadn't noticed the cross-post.
Andy
Only one of them is.
Nope, its mostly ethanol.
Methanol is indistinguishable taste wise from ethanol, that's the problem.
I've just gone and looked it up. (this is of course UK specific)
AKA
says that as of July 2013 "The new formulation will be for every 100 parts by volume of alcohol mix 3 parts by volume of isopropyl alcohol, 3 parts by volume of methylethylketone and one gramme of denatonium benzoate."
and also
"The traditional UK formula for CDA (formerly known as methylated spirits or meths for short) contained a purple dye, provided by the chemical methyl violet. After much deliberation, it was decided that the European formula need not contain a dye. UK trade bodies were keen that this was reflected in UK law. HMRC was persuaded that there is no longer a pressing need to include a dye, so it will no longer be mandatory. However as some users of CDA may still expect the purple dye to be included, the same proportion of methyl violet that was present in the old formula will be permitted if required."
So it needn't be purple and doesn't contain methanol nor pyridine. I couldn't have been much more wrong!
Though what they mean by 1gramme of denatonium benzoate per part of alcohol I don't know.
Andy
That is mostly ethanol, not methanol.
mix 3 parts by volume of isopropyl alcohol, 3
Yeah, its pretty poorly worded, particularly with the use of the word alcohol.
Occasionally meths drinkers have made the mistake in reverse with fatal results. It was possible (but extremely unhealthy and unplesant tasting) to drink methylated spirits prepared with the old formula. Methanol is metabolised by the body to formaldehyde which is what does the damage but with meths the ethanol is metabolised to acetaldehyde in preference.
In the end I went for the Brother MFC-J6920DW (£170). It was a close thing between that and the cheaper Epson WF-7610DWF, but the Brother had a slightly better Amazon review score, also it has two paper trays.
A bit fiddly to set up network printing, but all working now. Text is slightly less crisp and dark than the laserjet, but fine for printing engineering drawings. One test photo came out nicely, scanner works well. Paper trays feel a bit flimsy but it's not going to get heavy use. It is a fraction of the weight of the Laserjet 8000 that it is replacing. Using A3, the tray sticks out 15 cm at the front and the paper is transverse to the scanner, so the footprint is more or less square. Overall, quite impressed.
There should be an option for rotating the scan output 90º in the driver, so as to retain the orientation of the scanned document. The relationship of the paper in the tray to the scanner should be irrelevant and easily rotated using the driver.
It is time to RTFM. Check page 43 of the manual for paper orientation using "User Defined" as the Paper size in the printer driver.
Sorry but you have missed my point. There's no problem fitting images to the paper, etc, it is that the basic body of the machine is about 55 cm "wide" and 40 cm "deep", but with the A3 tray deployed it becomes 55 cm deep. So it takes up a bit more room than you think it is going to, going by the apparent dimensions. The old laserjet 8000 sat very nicely on my window-sill (my walls are more than 2 feet thick), but the tray of the Brother overhangs slightly. (It's not as high as the LJ though, and is *very* much lighter).
:-)
Sorry
In that case, a sledge hammer should be able to modify the wall to make everything fit.
All I was trying to point out to anyone interested that, if you read the dimensions quoted on Amazon, but want to use an A3 tray, you will find that it is actually more than 6 inches / 15 cm larger in one dimension. When I get around to it, I will make that point in an Amazon review.
You probably already know this, but if you're scaling from printout and the dimensions are all critical, scan and print a piece of commercially- printed graph paper and check the result--if it's off then you'll have an idea of what you have to do to compensate.
You mean because the printer may stretch or squeeze in the "paper feed" direction compared to the transverse direction. I agree. In my case, I am typically looking at prints of scans of blueprints so there are several opportunities for this error, although print borders sometimes have scales on both axes. In my present exercise, I have mostly been scaling dimensions which are parallel to a quoted dimension on the drawing, so this is less of an issue.
Not only that but sometimes the spacing going across the page is not quite even.
I used to use my Epson 3800 to print CAD generated drawings. I found the prints were accurate to a fraction of a millimetre anywhere on an A2 size sheet. The biggest cause of error was the stability of the paper in that depending on the paper prints could fractionally change dimensions over night.
I expect this to be the case with most high quality printers.
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