We purchased some more incredibly expensive ink for our Epson DX4450 all-in-one printer yesterday to print something out.... it's rather annoying that if ANY colour runs out the printer simply won't print... so I opened the beast up and put in the cartridge and it went through it's ink priming cycle only to be confronted with a paper jam.... so I cleared it .... or thought I had and tried again .... same thing happened.... RIGHT !!! I reloaded the paper, fanned it, checked the paper path all seemed fine... would it print ? would it buggery....
It was at about the 10th attempt to print something, that it made the most expensively loud and grinding sound after which it simply stopped trying to feed paper and just sat there endlessly winding itself on with no paper movement... so I went onto the Epson web site which proved about as much use as a chocolate fire guard in front of a steel blast furnace... there was only one thing for it.... I needed a Philips screwdriver and I wasn't afraid to use it !!! So I set to work dismantling the beast....
Now I'm a trained Epson Engineer on their laser and dot matrix printers of yestermillenia but that was many years ago and I may as well have been an untrained baboon taking it apart, I have to say these new Epson printers aren't built to be taken apart at all, they have fire once plastic clips on them once fired they stay fired....they are basically throw away printers and once you get inside them, which is no mean feat you realise why.... there is very little in it to throw away.... gone are the days of massive circuit boards with endless heatsunk transistors to take the wattage....and an enormous switch mode PSU.... you could run these things on a single AAA battery....
So once inside I could actually see what was causing the problem.... I had a chunk of paper which had torn off under the back paper feed wheel ... all crunched up.... but being old and wise to these kinds of faults it meant that wasn't the cause of it.... paper doesn't simply rip off there is a reason for it... and a little further digging and peering about I discovered this little beauty :-
| Freya !!! come here a minute please.... |
Can you see the frayed edges ? that's where the paper drive mechanism had tried to feed it through the paper path... needless to say it failed hence the expensive grinding sound it made.... So after removing the offending item above, I set about putting the printer back together, which with no disassembly /assembly manual requires a brain capable of navigating the Dan-y-Ogof cave system blindfolded using nothing more than echo location to find your way back.... I had hundreds of screws on the desk and a very taken apart printer....
the worst part was assembling the scanner module which although clip together technology with just two screws required to secure it, it required the balance of a trapeze artist and the dexterity of a juggler to put back together... that done the rest clipped back together without much of a problem.....
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| Bits and bobs |
The picture above is about half way through the assembly process....
Now the universal sign of a good engineer is always to have at least two or three screws left over because you have improved the design of the device by removing excess weight and still it works...
Well I must be losing my touch because I had no screws left and no I hadn't lost any on the floor.... The moment of truth was upon me... I powered it up.... it went through it's initialisation procedure of priming the ink cartridges pumping half the ink out as usual and sat there waiting for some data.... s
So I sent it a test print with my fingers and other body parts crossed.... I have to admit I was half expecting that horribly expensive grinding sound.... but no I still had the printer magic and it performed beautifully even the scanner scanned.... all was well in my world.....
now what was it I wanted to print out again ????
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