The good ole days?

[Bob Eager]

Is this the concertina effect at the back end of the paper?

[Huge]

My 5M does this, especially if printing a lot of pages. Is there a straight-forward cure?

[T i m]

To be honest it's been a long time since I've fired them up and I hadn't done anything to them since I was given them (I had 3 and gave one to the guy next door to use). I'm not sure I remember any specific faults but just sufficiently unpredictable to not risk a big double sided print run.

I will fire them up again as I no longer have the easy access to a plethora of printers I used to. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Bob Eager]

Replace the exit rollers (two shafts at the back). New rollers are pretty cheap, and I have a document that I wrote which explains how to do it (a bit easier to read than the entire service manual).

I've never had much success with messing with the old rollers, myself.

The place I used to get them seems to have given up on printers. These people do them in a kit that includes the pickup stuff too:

[Terry Casey]

I've still got a 6L kicking around somewhere - looks identical to the 5L (and probably is).

This had a pick up problem when the paper reservoir got low but was fine if you kept plenty of paper in it.

Trouble was, of course, that it takes so few sheets to fill it that you had to top it up qite frequently if you were using it a lot ...

[Spamlet]

Only if you are copying blank sheets of paper :-)

Possibly it's the immediate 'wiping' with high voltage that gets all the electrons back in the right places; whereas in the sun they are ejected and perhaps the coating deteriorates before they get back. Did read up on the physics of all this when I stripped my first copier but that was a long time ago...

I'd say it is more fragile now and has to work harder. My first copier drum was several inches diameter, and I think it had to be regularly given a wipe over (IPA ?). Maybe only one or two turns for an A4 sheet, whereas today's must do at least 4 I would imagine. I never wore out the drum on the copier and it used to use toner by the litre. I just ran out of other spares in the end: it was silicon rubber rollers on the fuser unit that kept getting scored.

S

[Spamlet]

Used to work in a place that made 'printing requisites'. Many of these were basically IPA or White Spirit, with different coloured dyes in. 'Blanket (rubber like your rollers) Cleaner', was IPA. 'Blanket Reviver' was IPA with a bit of trichloroethane in, that made the rubber swell a little to take the shine off.

Agreed on the paper issues. Also note that if your paper block has a burr, one side will pick up better than the other. Probably would differ with machines but I imagine a downward facing bur would be less likely to pick up the next sheet down, than an upward facing one. Possibly this is why some packs of paper have arrows on.

S

[Andrew Gabriel]

I got a number of the old HP laser printers going again by turning over the roller rubbers (probably model 3's, can't recall if I did it on our model 4's). They were effectively short stubby elastic bands, and if you turned them inside out, you had a fresh new rubber surface again.

[Andrew Gabriel]

PCW (magazine) did an article on postscript when the printer launched (1985, I think), and I did quite a lot of playing with the one we had in the office (which is probably the exact same one I have now, as I bought it from my employer when they scrapped it some years later).

I found the whole idea of downloading a program to run in the printer fascinating. One of the first things I tried was a postscript fractal program to produce a mandlebrot image

took some hours to run, and the problem I initially had was that other people looking at the print queue would see my tiny print job had apparently hung the printer, and switch it off and on again;-) The concept of a tiny spool file taking ages to print was completely alien at the time to most people, who had no concept of downloading a program to run in the printer. Eventually I ran it overnight, when I'd worked out how to stop the security guards switchng the printer off overnight.

I did occasional postscript programming through to the late 1990's. One of the projects was printing CD faces where the printing sections had very strange shaped bounding boxes (edge of the CD, and edge round the centre hole), and the text required was different per CD. The postscript program itself did all the word wrapping to fit in the bounding boxes, plus choosing a font size so it all fitted in. It's a shame most use of postscript today doesn't even scratch the surface of its powerful capabilities.

Before the postscript printer, we used imagen (sp?) printers, which used the same Canon printing engine, sitting on top of a filing cabinet sized box of electronics to do the rasterising. I never looked into what the imagen printing language looked like.

[Andrew Gabriel]

I think mine's going to the tip this afternoon.

[Huge]

of Postscript, when I worked for Xerox.

[Steve Firth]

I used to write small PosScript routines for features like adding bar codes, Hazmat labels and the "DRAFT" markings behind the text. What astonishes me, is how much code Microsoft need to achieve the same ends.

The PostScript printers I used in the 1980s were more powerful than the computers attached to them.

[T i m]

I have a manual that seems to cover the 5 and 6L so I think you are right.

Yup, per my mates 5L.

Indeed.

I fitted the new pickup roller and separator pad yesterday and then encountered a new paper feed problem. It seemed to pickup and separate ok but also may have seemed slow to pickup in the first place and generally hung / (timed out?) as the paper was still in the initial feeder area. However, the odd sheet also went though ok (although ... may have been printed a bit low (stuff missing off the top, suggesting a delay somewhere)).

Running the thing with the lid off and toner cartridge out did suggest is was sticking within the first feed area and long story short I replaced the spring that came on the new separator heel plate with the original (lighter) one and it seemed to be much better.

Now it feeds reliably but is a bit skewed.

I might leave the new pickup roller in but try the old separator plate, once I've livened up the rubber a bit (the new strip is quite rubbery and old one quite hard). I could also put the original side pads back in etc.

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Looking closer at this printer you seem to have a rubber cam-shaped pickup wheel that works against a spring loaded 'heel' that holds all the other sheets back. On the new heel I got the strip is very 'rubbery' and the paper seems to be having difficulty actually getting through this area, as if there is too much resistance 'grip' there now. There are also the two small side pads, either side of the heel but I'm not quite sure when these come into play? (I replaced the new heel spring with the old (lighter) spring and at least it does work now).

The machine as I was given it had two issues. Not picking up paper (probably the pickup roller) and feeding multiple sheets (probably the separator heel / pads).

However, there are two more rollers that pull the paper though the pickup / separator area and they may also be worn (and may be party to the current skewing issue, along with slightly too much drag)?

Cheers, T i m