Printer Failure

Many years ago I bought a Fuji Xerox DocuPrint 3210DX - a colour laser printer that has served me well. It's real issue is the huge expense for the toner cartridges - some $400+. Of course, the generic cartridges are far cheaper but come with their own issues, but that is another story.

Every time a cartridge needs to be replace, there is the dilemma as to whether to replace the cartridge or throw the entire printer in the bin and get a $50 ink jet printer to deal with the few print jobs that I need these days.

One should always be pragmatic and ignore the amount of money previously invested and just focus on the future bottom line. I don't know who this "one" person is so eventually a new cartridge arrives delivered to my door.

All was reasonably good until this appeared on the screen:

No idea what this really meant but I think I found some info that it is possibly related to the fuser. That is terrible news as a fuser is $450 and there is no way I am paying that for a non-consummerable.

Surely I could hack around and try and fix the problem if I could pinpoint it. I went all out and purchased the printer's service manual on one of those "manual library" sites. I figured the money was justified. The manual indicated the problem was indeed in the fuser area and it indicated further info could be obtained with some magic keypad combinations and as I found out, specific tongue angling was required as well.

I was less than excited with the manual's description of that error.

"Timeout 1"?!?!? The surely don't want to give out too much info. It seemed to be possible that a faulty fuser heater would cause the roller to not reach operating temperature, hence the timeout.  I was not thrilled by the thought but it could also be nothing more than a dodgy connection so it was time to delve into the circuit.

Seems the fuser should be something easy to check and not to difficult to remove from the printer. 10 minutes work and the fuser was out on the bench and testing showed the heater was open circuit. A few screws removed and the thermostat was revealed. I was suddenly a little more hopeful as a faulty thermostat would give the same symptoms but no, the thermostat was closed circuit. I figured it was time to get medieval on it and attack the heater with the wire cutters and out it came.

Sure enough, the heater was reading open circuit. There is no way I'm buying an entire fuser unit just to replace the lamp. After a lot of hunting around, I was able to find what seems to be a suitable replacement heater on Aliexpress - 2 for $30 delivered. Who knows how long delivery is going to take from China in these pandemic days, but at least they will eventually arrive here. Will require a bit of fiddling to wire it in as they are not direct replacements but it should be doable.

As it was going to be a while before the heater arrive (the extra $5 to expedite delivery a little bit won't make much difference) I thought it wise to put the parts back in the printer.

Of course, I looked down on the bench to find a previously unseen spring laying there all innocent-like.

I eventually found it's home purely because of symmetry and the matching spring on the other side. After much fiddling I finally had it in place, only to find one of it's mates also decided to take a trip when it should have been staying at home in self isolation.

More time spent juggling bits but I finally found its home on a part that I will leave to later to reassemble - mainly because it would involve disassembling what I had to squeeze in the spring - too lazy to do that just now.

So here I wait for China Post to do its thing. Slight hopeful that it will go according to plan but I am not laying any bets.

To be continued.....