I posted about this before but it got back burnered. I ran out of black ton er and the thing quit working. I was reluctant to buy a toner cartridge bec ause I suspected something had gone wrong with the printer. I was right. Th e black did start to fade away of course, but one day it just wouldn't prin t anything at all in any color. All the sudden like.
Recently I acquired a junk printer the same model. I was told it needs a fu ser which is quite expensive. After taking it apart (violently) I can see w hy. Yes I animaled it a bit because I don't have all month.
Anyway, in my opinion, not enough paper has been run through mine to think the fuser is even worn out. I never eve put toner in it.
It was not in the best of environments for a time. A small area full of peo ple smoking cigerettes among other things, and generally not air conditione d in the summer, and gas (gravity) heat in the winter. I suspected high vol tage problems.
If mine needs a fuser or any major mechanical thing it is getting thrown ou t. I see how this thing is put together and they certainly don't make it ea sy to take apart. I will say that it is prety nifty engineering really. I w on't say impressive but not being familiar with this type of equipment I ca n appreciate the design.
On one side is a board with the HV supply, they use jumper wires on the com ponent side to make contact with spring things that conduct all the way to the toner cartridges which have the rollers built in. So far so good. That is the part I am going to get into first on mine.
At this point I wonder what kind of voltages I should expect. Of course mor e than zero but how much ? Couple hundred, couple thousand ? I can't see it being over about 2 KV because it doesn't appear to be made for any higher. If I see 700 volts there I would have no idea if that is low or what at th is point so that is one piece of information I would like.
Unless I find that something was spilled on the board, and I lack HV which I suspect, it seems quite possible that one of the cartridges might be shor ted. Of course I do not expect this to show up on an ohmmeter....
If anyone has worked on these I would appreciate anything. If I wanted to e liminate the toners as a short, how would I go about faking the machine out to make it run with them removed ? I might have a way, almost....
The junk machine had one toner missing. I already put the black in mine and tried it. It reads full up which brings me to another question. I wonder h ow it tells the level.
From what I've gathered, printers now do not need to weigh the toner or det ect the level of ink in an inkjet, they can approximate it very closely by just what has been printed. Apparently this causes a problem when one refil ls his own. As such they sell a replacement chip for the cartridge that sup posedly fools the machine into working.
Having thought about the matter, this could work several different ways. Of course the data could be burned into the chip, but it could also be stored in the machine in NVRAM and the chip on the toner is simply a serial numbe r. This would work just fine unless people started swapping toners. Would H P go to the trouble of doing it the harder way ? (well, more expensive by P ENNIES !)
The vendors of the replacement chips state that your printer must be workin g well at the time of replacement for it to work, after that you just fill the tank when the need arises.
The question therefore is; the toner I put in from the donor machine reqds full, does that mean it's full or is the machine just assuming it is new an d starting its countdown ?
I will be tearing into the machine I want to save in the next couple days. I would like some ideas about what kind of voltages to expect and so forth. Anything help[ful is appreciated, and if I (we) get this thing running the re might be some beer in it for someone....
Thanks in advance.