On Saturday, 7 April 2018 00:51:26 UTC+1, wrote:
Well. some know that I am broke lately, but even when I was doing well I liked to hold on to money except for certain things.

So I have this printer. I bought it new, but then it was in not so friendly an environment. There were cigarette smokers, pot smokers and drug smokers around. Eventually the printing faded. I suspected maybe a HV problem or something because all colors were affected. It sat dormant for a time until I found a parts unit. I changed the HV board and whatnot, and finally the LASER assembly. That made it work. I took the original one apart and found that the spinning mirror was dirty as hell. All I would have had to do was clean it. So it is working, and I seriously do not remember going through an alignment procedure for registration. I have seen a bunch of color printers and generally they print a color page and you set values in software to make the colors align. More modern units that include a scanner sometimes do it themselves, just scan the test sheet you just printed and it makes a few noises and sets itself.

I do not remember doing any such thing with this printer, and when I first installed the LASER unit the registration was indeed off. But it did it itself. It was not long before it was in perfect registration. (I went on a beer run I think) I figure it must have sensors like a late model three tube rear projection TV with the "autoconverge" feature, though I saw no evidence of any sensors.

The issue now is one of toner. Following is what I have read about that :

They sell toner refill kits. Low toner is calculated by usage by a small chip on the cartridge. A new ("bootleg")chip is sold with the toner refill kit.

It somehow fools the machine into not knowing the toner is low. They said that you must change this chip before it runs completely out because somehow it knows in software that is was empty. By then it is too late. Not sure if I believe this but it is possible.

Now my machine is saying to buy cyan toner. I think it is in error because with the dirty mirror it should not have used as much as the usage should indicate. Right now the prints come out fine with perfect, deep color so it is not low enough to fade by any stretch.

The parts printer I got had toner cartridges in it and in fact I used the black already, no problem there. The guy must have changed it so it is probably not a "promotional" one that comes with it only half full so they can extract $ 70 each for them. All four add up to almost half the cost of the whole thing. (more than half of what I paid)

The parts printer had a bad (IIRC) "transfer belt" ? The rollers on the color toners are wrecked but the black is fine. I believe there was cat urine in that machine and that caused the problem.

So my thought is to take the cyan from the parts machine, put that chip in my cartridge with the good roller, and somehow extract the rest of the cyan toner to top it off.

I am looking for tips and tricks o how to do this. They have instructions but I think they come with the refill kit as I was unable to find it on the web. At least in the past. Someone may say it is available now and stick up a link, which I would appreciate, but that won't cover how to get the toner out of the other cartridge, which I would really like to do.

I also have some black Xerox copier toner which I am pretty sure can be used. Most of my printing is text in black so the first "bootleg" chip is most likely to go in the black so I can just throw in more toner as needed. If so it'll probably last longer than I do.

What am I wrong about and what am I right about ?

The other two printers in the house are inkjets with clogged heads due to non-use, one of them is a four ink type without the heads built into the cartridge. I am going to get the model number of that one, do a web search on the subject and try to clean the print head, but if that doesn't work I'll be back about it.

With these inkjet printers being practically disposable around here, any help in getting this LASER printer to be low maintenance is appreciated, so thanks in advance.


Do yourself a favour and bin the inkjets. Once ink dries in the head they're usually a waste of time, and they'll only clog again. If you must play, try alcohol.

Opening the cart: is there really no youtube vid showing a refill/recon on your cart?


NT