I have this old (about 13 years old) laser printer and I’m not too sure whether it works. It worked the last time I used it, which was probably at least 8 years ago, and the rest of the time it’s pretty much been sitting in a closet. Now it doesn’t actually put any toner on the paper when it tries to print. Does a toner cartridge go “bad” when it sits for a long time? If I sink $100 into a new toner cartridge, is this thing likely to just work? Is there a cheaper way I can troubleshoot it (in case it’s just dead)?
Ebay for the toner cart. Do a good hunt for misspellings and parsing errors (weird stock numbers, missing dashes and omitted letters) Pennies on the dollar compared to Staples, etc when shooting for older cartridges.
I cannot argue about the power-sucking, but buff all the visible rollers up with an emery board and there is a good chance you will have a nice laser printer.
I rotate four HP Laserjet 4 units and the toner savings is incredible. The printers hardly ever die and parts are cheap. We call them frickin’ tanks, in a good sense. I hate how Staples charges 70 dollars for a little toner cart nowadays.
I suppose it is hight time to do the math on the energy costs tho’…
I’ve asked myself this, and the answer is that I absolutely want to use this printer. I place a lot of value on not throwing stuff away and replacing it just because new stuff is cheap. Partly because new stuff is … cheap (as in cheaply made). If this is still a good printer, it will do the job just fine, I won’t be putting it in a landfill, and I won’t be encouraging the market for piece of garbage printers that cost less than their ink cartridges and last approximately as long (the reason I’m pulling out the old battleship is that my wife’s Epson inkjet has given up the ghost after less than two years of extremly light use).
As far as speed and compatibility go: I print about one page per month max, so this printer is approximately 172,000 times the speed I need (correction: it’s probably only 100,000 times the speed I need; the 4ppm stat was very optimistic if I recall), and it’s a postscript printer, so it just works with no special drivers.
DevNull: when you say buff up the rollers – I assume you’re not talking about the drum, right? Can you elaborate or point me to a reference? I’ll check out cheap toner on ebay.
You will probably notice a line across all your pages where a roller rested against the print drum for 8 years, causing a dead spot. If the toner cartridge includes the drum as most modern printers do, replacing the cartridge will fix this. But some laser printers from that era had a separate print drum that will have to be replaced as well. I am not familiar with that model, so I can’t say if that is the case here. But if you have a line across all your pages, that is probably the cause.
Geez; this takes me back a ways! You may not actually be able to use it with modern computers. IIRC it has an Appletalk interface and a Vax-specific serial port that isn’t RS-232. Neither of these are present on modern computers. It might have a parallel port too.
Not necessarily. Could also be the fuser roller. You should be able to determine which roller is the culprit by measuring the distance between the lines.
I figured there would be thousands of pages out there on this topic but I could barely find any talk of it. I thought it was common knowledge… especially seeing as how it is the same thing with mouse balls.
When rubber-type things are rolled around alot, especially in a hot enviroment, they glaze up. This happens with age too. Taking an emery board to the surface will take the layer of glaze off. The exit rollers, most notably on HP Laserjets, are big offenders as are almost all intake rollers on laser fax machines.
People tend to use alcohol to rejuvenate glazed rollers, but that lasts a day or so, in my experience. Get rid of the offending layer. Just watch out where shavings fall. Keep them out of the works… even though they can’t cause much damage, you might introduce the grains off a cheap emery board and that would be cause for worry.
Every 1152 I have seen has a PC parallel port. If you are brave enough to ever try a parallel to USB adapter, let me know how that works out.
Fuser wire? Do you mean corona wire? Newer printers incorporate so much into the toner cartridge, but these old beasties had many fiddly bits to look after and clean with every cartridge change. Corona wires were fairly easy to break with ham-handed cleaning. Not sure how easy it is to replace one in these guys.
The guts of this particular beast are known as a Canon LX engine. The HP IIP, IIP+ and IIIP are the same internals as well, so you can try scavenging parts off of one of those.
The fuser has a long skinny quartz lamp inside the roller - this is what produces the heat. They can burn out like any other light bulb, and their contacts can overheat and burn. By the time a fuser lamp goes out, you may as well replace the fuser drum/roller as a unit.
For $99, you can get a maintenance kit that includes a remanufactured fuser and all of the rubber parts, or for $40, just the rollers. (my only connection to that company is as a repeat customer)