Reply To: OCU C)HT C Discussion Lesson 11

So the book says vacuum out dust and debris, clean the toner cartridge head, corona wires, internal fans, clean and replace pick, separator & feed rollers, replace maintenance kits at designated intervals, and calibrate printheads & registration as needed.

My first job right out of college was working for a thermal transfer printer company. Obviously you want to clean out all machines, but the primary components that needed serviced on these were cleaning & replacing the printheads, they would wear on the edges where the rolls of thermal labels & stock would rub against the printhead directly in areas the ribbon did not cover. Other than that they were solid built devices with not too much else that went wrong with them aside from board level repair & flashing or replacing the EEPROMS. Inkjet printers need printheads cleaned and make sure nozzles don’t get clogged.

I worked as a laser printer technician for several years afterward. Most of the laser printers serviced today have heating lamp now, but some larger laser printers that print 90 plus pages a minute may still use corona wires, which I do have experience cleaning as well & then using setting powder before reinserting in the fusing belt/ roller. They definitely need cleaned and vacuumed out regularly. The photoconductors (drum), cleaning blade, charge rollers, can be cleaned, however most manufacturers opt to swap them out as an all-in-one unit. Fans are important to clean as they may cause overheating if clogged with dust & debris. But changing feed rollers at the designated time interval is a must. Like getting oil changed on a car, if you don’t replace certain components after 200K copies, etc, you may run into many problems. Most printer manufacturers have product support guides which tell you how long components are rated to last; 30K copies, 100K, 300K, like cars tell you how often to rotate tires, change oil, spark plugs and so on.