Printer Madness

Well, it’s been a very busy week. As you may have been aware of, our Birch Tree in the back yard has been an issue for concern lately... I'm afraid that it had to go. It has become a source of tension between us and the neighbour for some time now. We have always considered it (the tree) a bit of a pest due to its tendency to drop leaves and pods into the gutters and our neighbour has voiced his disapproval on a number of occasions (usually in a drunken stupor). So at the end of the day and now that we can afford to remove it, we have had it chopped down and ground into mulch. It affects the landscape of the backyard profoundly, but we are glad to see it gone and the tension between ourselves and the neighbours also.

Work is well...work as usual. I got a printer in the workshop earlier this week and I thought I might take the opportunity to share a few pictures of it in the process of disassembly.


As you can see, it’s quite involved. The removal of parts must be done in a certain order as many panels/parts rely on other panels or parts as anchor points for their attachment. This is the QMS-Minolta 2300 Desk Laser. Unfortunately, she has a problem: A faulty solenoid in the paper pickup tray mechanism is stopping her from picking up any paper at all. The job of the tray 1 solenoid is to engage a clutch mechanism that among other duties, releases the paper lifting tray for paper to be fed into the printer's transport rollers sheet by sheet at precise moments.

This solenoid along with potentially thousands of others in 2300DL’s worldwide was plagued with a rather unfortunate manufacturing problem that led to their replacement en mass. This is one of the problems with technology. Rely on somebody to do the job for you and you don't always get what you bargained for. Having said this, it is increasingly common for many manufacturers to use identical parts. The most recent example of one that has been implemented with disastrous results happens to be Dell’s use of Sony Lithium Ion Batteries in their laptop range of Latitude’s (D600’s and the like). Apparently, batteries can ignite due to poor insulating materials inside the battery that would ordinarily prevent the mixture of lithium and oxygen that causes the batteries to ignite.

Anyway. My point is that all products experience common and sometimes dramatic problems that are simple manufacturing flaws that are actually less common these days due to the improvements in the overall manufacturing processes used in computer components and associated hardware.

Back to the photos though… My final picture is the reassembled Magicolour in all its unimpressive glory. I must admit, It has never won any awards for good looks. Funnily enough, Epson have used the 2300DL engine in their own line of colour laser printers. Very few companies are truly innovative today. Epson is no exception to this rule, and continue to use Minolta technology in their products under license. For more than a decade, HP have invested time and effort into development of products that were for all intents and purposes, Canon inventions or at least inventions that had been made viable by them. So this part pictured above, is the offending part anyway. It costs around $2 to buy and over $250 in labour to fit.

Cool thing about Minolta printers is the quality of their construction. It is a joy to work on them.I marvel at their overall complexity and yet, underlying simplicity. Cool stuff.