Printer Panic

This is how the Bastards get you… We’ve bought a couple of Canon MG3660s – because they’re cheap. And also because not one of them has lasted more than a ream of paper. They perish in the same way – there’s a scrinch noise, paper stops feeding and crumples up inside, open them up at the relevant panels and remove the paper but the printer now believes it has a paper jam, FOREVERRRRRRR!

And so why would we keep buying more of the same? Because every time without fail, we’ve just bought new ink cartridges for them. This time, two untouched tanks are sitting here, total value twice as much as the printer itself had been.

It may seem a false economy but of course in order to figure out what the problem is, I decided to strip the first one down to see what the problem might have been. I found everything in order, switches opened and closed when paper was inserted, were the right way around in relation to the paper path – but nothing could persuade the board to stop thinking the paper was jammed…

Now – the printer cost $45, same price as a black cartridge and about twenty bucks less than the colour. So a $45 printer consumes several lots of inks at $110, then dies. In the process, it prints around 400 pages.

And now the game-changer for me: I pulled the printer apart and gained a fairly serviceable 5V/12V power supply in its own isolated case, a set of scanner parts that I generally scavenge optics parts for projects out of, a scanner deck and glass plate that have proven ideal for illuminated A4-sized signs, and a complete set of motion components for CNC / 3D printer projects.

So to save having to throw out a full untouched set of inks, they’ve sold us several of the same printer, it’s performed service for 2-3 years each for us, I’ve gained a surfeit of parts, and the only problem I have now is I can’t finish unpacking the damn printer….

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