Mending Laser Printers with Bubble Wrap
Wednesday, February 4, 2009 at 09:55PM Some time back we got a colour laser printer. The price was amazing (cheaper than the first 9 pin dot matrix I ever bought) and we got a free set of toner cartridges too. The machine (a Samsung CLP-300) worked fine when we got it, and I thought that was that.
I was wrong.
It no longer feeds the paper in properly. The paper gets so far and then it sticks. Very annoying (a tip for printer buyers, do a search for “printername paper jam” before you buy one, just in case you get loads of hits. You do with the CLP-300…).
Anyhoo, I did some more searching and came across FixYa at http://www.fixya.com/. These people serve as collectors of self help tips for hardware owners, and there were quite a few threads about my printer, including one that said the springs in the paper tray were a bit under specified. These push the paper up against the first roller on the way into the machine, and get weak over time, leading to paper jams. The suggestion was to find some stronger springs.
Unfortunately my local spring emporium was shut for the night, and so I was forced to improvise. Turns out that a length of bubble wrap (unpopped works best) rolled into a cylinder and forced underneath the tray provides just enough extra spring power to make the printer work a treat. I’m not sure how long it will last, so I’d probably better get some springs at some point, but at the moment it works fine.
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Reader Comments (3)
Pong is all done, 360 controllers and all for both players, AI three difficulty levels.
I'm just working on pause functionality which isn't so hard and making a custom font so my game stands out from the crowd...
Then its grphics and optimization...not bad since it hasn't been set yet.