My (relatively lightly used) Lexmark colour laser had stopped picking up paper. I wasn't particularly optimistic that cleaning the rollers would work, and expected to have to delve into the works. I was pleased to find on removing the (only) feed tray and turning it on its side that the rollers were readily accessible, and 1 ml of propanol on a cotton bud had it up and running in about a minute.
Excellent. ;-)
If the rollers have gone too far you can often find aftermarket kits to replace them and they can be fairly easy to do. Others can be a complete PITA of course.
Cheers, T i m
HP once had a inkjet printer with a paper roller pick up problem.
They sent out a free of charge fixing kit which consisted of a spring loaded plate to which was attached some of those green plastic pan scrubber pads. The pads were forced against the roller and some supplied software just turned the roller. The pan scrubbers just roughed up the roller surface.
Aargh. Flashback to my time as field support engineer for a document scanning system. Scanner feed rollers were an absolute PITA.
Somehow printers rollers lose their almost sticky surface and I suspect this is ground in paper dust and other bits of junk like toner and general dust in the e air. Brian
That was what haoppened to my HP photo printer which pulled the paper from a horizontal tray under the printer, up and onto the print bed.
After about 2 years no amount of cleaning would encourage the rollers to grip the paper, which also suffered from the varying humidity over the course of a year. Tnis is a problem for lightly used home printers. It printed good photos from its 6 cartridges (when it worked) :-(
Eventually I b> Somehow printers rollers lose their almost sticky surface and I suspect this
In a similar vein, when I worked for Kodak on their Microfilm and Fiche kit, one a cheque filmer called the 'Reliant 750' had quite a few rollers and would handle filming both sides of 750 cheques a minute. ;-)
Cheers, T i m
Our Samsung CLP-680dn became very intermittent at feeding paper. I'd already changed the rollers, but it got worse, so I decided that it was possibly a sensor fault or a tired motor and the paper wasn't being detected in time.
I saw one for sale, not far away, for spares or repairs on Ebay and put a bid in, thinking I could swap bits over. When I went to collect it, it turned out that the colour toners had run out and they'd lost the power lead and that was all that was wrong. I transferred both over from our printer, fired it up and found out that it'd only printed about 2,500 sheets! So basically they'd used up the toners supplied with it and discarded the whole thing.
The really good part, was I won the bid for only £2.20 :)
SteveW
I had a Canon, mono laser printer, with a vertical paper tray, long ago (that long ago that it was a WinPrinter). It was worked hard and was very reliable, until it eventually started feeding multiple pages. The fault was not the roller, but a pad at the bottom of the tray, the friction of which was enough to hold back all but the first (driven) sheet.
I dreaded having to fit a new pad, as it was right at the bottom, with no access without dismantling the printer, but it turned out that Canon were using HP mechanisms and HP did a repair kit.
It cost me a tenner for the kit, shipped from the States and it was a work of art. Simply a sticky pad and a load of cardboard. When folded along the pre-formed lines and the various tabs inserted, it formed a rectangular outer guide that fitted perfectly into the paper tray and an inner slider that guided the pad into the perfect position. No disassembly required at all.
SteveW
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