Does anyone enjoy fixing printers?

The LaserJet 4200N is now consistently jamming. There seems to be some obstruction in the upper feed section of the machine.

I enjoy building many things, but 2D printers are not one of these things. My personal repair strategy of “kick it to death and buy another” seems inappropriate here. Given the Hive environment, it may well just be dust in an inaccessible place.

Would anyone else be interested in taking a crack at it?

  • Ry

Maybe there’s an Egg McMuffin in there. I had to extract an egg McMuffin from a $750,000 machine a few years back. They can be very damaging breakfast sandwiches. The repair was extensive.

For the amount of grief that printer gives, plus the low volume of pages printed, do we really want to fix it? It is a nice printer, in theory, but it’s always requiring some sort of troubleshooting due to the complexity of network printing in a hacker space network. To add insult to injury, it only has an ethernet port and a parallel port (remember those?), so, if it’s offline, one cannot just plug in USB and press print. So:

Is there a printer solution that is easier and more user friendly, and does not require any sort of IT insight when idiots like me use it? Would a modern so-easy-lorin-can-use-it $80 Brother be suitable? I may be off the mark here, though…

I just bought the Dell E310W on sale for $50. It is a duplex monochrome laser printer but the replacement toner cartridges are like $15.
I got mine at Staples, I think the Dell website has it also.

I can attest from experience , a 4200 N series, sucks ubber balls to service anything on… you nearly have to tear the entire thing into pieces to get to any the roller feed tracks to get something out but most likely usually a worn roller… they were not really made to be serviced like the ole Si series…

But if you dont care that it ever works again I’ve torn one down before… lol and make no guarantee it will work as expected afterwards :smiley:

Or I can just give you my like circa 2002 HP printer service manual and have at it :smiley: I almost pitched those things last week actually …

This is definitely the solution:

https://youtu.be/u8I6qt_Z0Cg



From: Barry Kimball
Sent: Saturday, February 3, 2018 2:58 PM
To: cincihackerspace@googlegroups.com
Reply To: cincihackerspace@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [CHP] Does anyone enjoy fixing printers?

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I can attest from experience , a 4200 N series, sucks ubber balls to service anything on… you nearly have to tear the entire thing into pieces to get to any the roller feed tracks to get something out but most likely usually a worn roller… they were not really made to be serviced like the ole Si series…

But if you dont care that it ever works again I’ve torn one down before… lol and make no guarantee it will work as expected afterwards :smiley:

Or I can just give you my like circa 2002 HP printer service manual and have at it :smiley: I almost pitched those things last week actually …

Amusing to see this crossing my news feeds today…

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams-persist

  • Ry

Great read!

John2pt0