Reply to post: Another one bites the dust?

Built to last: Time to dispose of the disposable, unrepairable brick

rcw88

Another one bites the dust?

Its not just laptops - how about the tens of thousands of HP Inkjets that have gone to recycling / landfill all for the sake of a .001 cent sprocket that splits and breaks the paper load mechanism. I bought an A3 HP inkjet off eBay, yeah caveat emptor, absolutely, it was dusty, but worked. The web page said it had only done 4000 pages. It stopped loading paper. Following a grainy YouTube video I dismantled almost the entire printer, reassembling cause no end of random 0x6000**** errors, but you still can't get to the paper load mechanism from above... Bit more googling - aha, take the cartridges out, invert, examine. Some HP printers have a window in the bottom of the paper tray and you can see the drive sprocket, alternatively take a guess and enlarge a hole that's already there.. If you can see knurling, the gear has moved on the shaft..

The fault?, rubbish engineering - there's a knurl on the drive shaft that the sprocket is force fitted over and over time, the lack of material at the root of the gear tooth results in the gear splitting, then merrily rotating on the shaft - so no paper loading mechanism any more.

The fix?, slide the gear back over the knurling, making sure it aligns with the next gear in the chain, see if you can find the split in the gear and then apply a good drop of superglue, not so much it goes over everything else but just on the sprocket. Leave to dry. Put everything back. Mine's done over a 1000 pages since.

The precise location of the gear varies by model so YMMV but its worth a try. I'm on a mission to fix the next common fault, broken touchscreens.

N.B. HP's website has hundreds of 'customers' aka victims, with the same problem, solution?, buy a new printer... OK I can get one on end of line sale for a tenner occasionally at the local supermarket, but that's not the point is it? And neither is HP's extortionate ink pricing, in the race to the cheapest devices, everyone loses, because we are all inhabiting a precious place.

P.S. I use the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Pixel x86 on ten year old laptops for STEM / Code club - works a treat, and its no biggie if it breaks, I can just reinstall in half an hour.

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