I recently picked up at no cost an HP Laserjet 3300mfp off of a mailing list. It doesn’t seem that HP is still making it. The woman I got it from said that an HP tech told her that HP could fix it at the factory for something like $270, and so she decided to just get rid of it. I got it free, so I’m not afraid to crack it open and try to fix it.
The unit is basically a laser printer with a flat-bed scanner attached to the top of it. Amazon link:
When I plug it in, it goes into a diagnostic mode, and then tries to warm up the scan head. The scan head scoots about an inch from its rest position into the glass area, then goes back, then scoots out, forever and ever and ever, accompanied by a worrisome grinding noise. My guess is that it can’t sense where the head is, and keeps trying to reset it, or it can’t get the head into the position it wants. I found a “service manual” but the troubleshooting section doesn’t mention this particular behaviour, skipping instead to “copied pages come out blank” and such - I can’t even get the thing fully on and ready to copy.
My plan of attack right now is to crack it open and see if anything seems out of place - gears not catching, belts loose, etc.
Any other suggestions? Anybody have any resources I could look at on how scanners work in general? Better repair guides?
(I only found 1 thread that looked similar to this question)
Basically, it’s an HP employee telling people to send in their units, and a couple of other people posting instructions on how to take apart the scanning unit. It also contains a link to this gem: