Thanks to what might be a design flaw, my HP color laser printer needs to be disassembled roughly every 8 months in order to clean the mirrors and lenses in the laser scanner assembly.
As dust accumulates, the magenta color gradually fades away. To fix this, the printer needs to be gutted and the box of lasers taken out and opened up. The recommendation is to gently dust the thing out with Q-tips. The last time I did it, I think I may have managed to give everything a static charge as the color faded out within a week.
What can I use to clean the lenses and first-surface mirrors that will not leave a static charge?
Bonus question: Is there any sort of small sacrificial thing I can put near the optics to attract the dust to so I don’t have to clean this thing as often?
My first thought would be to try to keep the dust away by flowing air over the mirror - using something like an aquarium pump. The downside is, the cure might be worse than the disease, as it pumps unknown gunk onto the mirror.
There’s no room in there for an air pump. Good idea, and one I’d contemplated, but figuring a way to route a hose through the printer would be pretty challenging, and filtering it would also be hard - the stuff that gets on the optics is more like a haze than dust. I think the two main culprits are toner (And there’s lots of that floating around the insides of a printer!) and airborne minerals from an ultrasonic humidifier in the house.
The mirrors are first-surface, meaning they’re silvered on top of the glass to eliminate distortions caused by the laser beam reflecting off the surface of the glass as well as the silvering - this would cause a ghosting. By nature, the reflective surface of the mirror is already conductive. They’re also fragile.