Making rubber printer rollers more grippy?

POSTSCRIPT

The rollers have been thoroughly cleaned with a microfibre and isporopyl alcohol. In fact, I wonder if repeatedly using alcohol has hardened the rubber compound and made it more slippery.

Not sure if this is still the same product it used to be 30+ years ago, or if it's been re-formulated to be "green and useless"?

That may do a good job of cleaning the rollers but mine have been cleaned many times. "Leaves no residue" suggests the product contains alcohol or some volatile solvent.

I would like to make the current rollers more grippy. There used to be a paint-on solution to make belt drives on record turntables (like the old Thorens) more grippy and maybe there is something similar for printer rollers.

Maybe 30 yrs ago I received in the post out of the blue a thing from HP to attach to my HP printer to rectify a manufacturing fault. It seemed to be holding a nylon abrasive pad against the roller for a bit. I don't recall it ever having a problem or that it made a difference, but a thought for you - resurface it, gently.

TW

Many years ago one model of a HP printer had this problem. They sent out a fix which consisted of one of those green scouring pads used for washing dishes. This was attached to a metal plate which held it in place against the roller and they included a floppy disk with software which just turned the rubber roller.

Just rough up the rollers with a similar scouring pad or a bit of fine grit sand paper.

That was what it used to do, but perhaps the rollers back then were a bit more spongy to start with, rather than hard shiny rubber

Snap, I didn't have the problem with my printer in the first place but I used the fix. The printer failed a long time afterwards but it wasn't because of the rollers picking up the paper.

Perhaps it depends on how the rubber roller gains traction.

If traction relies on a gummy smooth surface then roughing it up is going to impair it.

I think a lot of it is dust. It gets compressed into the surface in the same way that talcum powder would. The problem is getting at the rollers to clean them. You really need to give them a good scrub. They used to sell a kind of paper that was supposed to be put through the printer with a slightly tacky surface that if used regularly, removed this, but I never had much success with that. Brian

Well, the issue often is uneven grip skewing the paper and getting it all jammed up. Photo copiers used to suffer a lot from this after a so called clean. I remember in them old days you could just detach the rollers and soak them in a bowl of some liquid, then give them a good clean and dry them. However the engineers simply swapped them for new ones to save time.

Brian

No don't use sandpaper, or worse still, glasspaper, the bits fall off in the innards. Scouring pads, well maybe, but you still need a solvent or at the least some kind of way to loosen the dust. Belts are one thing, but printers need to always slip a little to move paper till both rollers can grip it. Brian

What is the solvent for dust? A solvent for the rollers is like to just dissolve the surface and allow the existing dust to stick more.

I have an HP Laserjet, and after my attempts to fix a similar problem by abrading the surface a bit failed, I bought a spare roller off eBay. It was 'expensive' for what it was, but cheap in the scheme of things, and fixed the problem.

For some printers you can get new roller kits designed to fix this problem. They tend to be a better long term solution that simply cleaning / abrading the existing ones.

I used to work on document processing machines - the rubber infeed rollers would become glazed and not grip paper. The standard cleaner recommended by manufacturer was Benzine ..... but that is no longer allowable. We did swap to 1:1:1 Trichloroethane That is still available but unsure if it is sold to the pubic ...... a good solvent is ended to clean the rubber. Possibly methylene chloride (MEC), perchloroethylene (perc or PCE) and trichloroethylene (TCE).

If Benzine worked, I'd expect lighter fluid (the stuff for 'petrol' lighters) to work.

Brake cleaner is benzene mostly. Lighter fluid isnt far off either

"rubber regenerator" or "rubber rejuvenator"

grippy sprays don't last long. Better to rely on degreasing & light sanding if you can. Once they're too far gone for that, sand it some more and glue a rubber band on. I assume a thin smear of silicone could also work, not tried it yet.