EEVblog #488 - Dumpster Dive Parts Salvage

[miceuz]

oh man... where do I put all those BJT power transistors?

boards with smd components frequently come handy when you need an odd value SMD resistor.

[staze]

The resistor/diode piece from the laser printer is exactly as you said. It's the contact between power and the fuser, and if you get an overheat on the fuser, that resistor will burn out and save you from a fire. That part is pretty useful if you do printer repair... otherwise... worthless. =P

[staze]

I'd grab that Phaser and tear it down... could be cool since they use wax based ink... so there are micro heaters, etc. Very different than your typical printer. =)

[SeanB]

That Phaser is a laser printer, not wax. I have one of the wax ones at work, it is a 60kg shelf filler, too expensive to run, though I do have some of the "Free Black wax sticks" around for it.

[Stonent]

too expensive to run, though I do have some of the "Free Black wax sticks" around for it.

I used to do all my printing of work orders on the Phaser 850 we had years ago.  People used to just freak out at me doing that! Trying to explain to me how expensive the ink was for it and such and should print to the LJ4si sitting next to it and the Phaser was reserved for "special projects" only.  I tried numerous times to explain to them that the cartridges for the 4si were about $150 and the black wax was free. But they didn't understand.

One major undoing of the use of the Phaser printers at that employer was that we couldn't get people to understand that just because you can force a Phaser 350 wax block into a 850 by breaking the corners off you should not do it (or vice versa)

One way caused the wax to smoke and carbonize inside the printer because it got too hot, the other way caused the wax to solidify part way in the nozzles because the temperature was too low.

So after having a $1000 printer overhaul done by Tek to get the printer running again they'd be all pissed at Tek for designing printers with different temperature ranges.  Again I had to explain to them that you couldn't run transparencies through a Phaser 350 because the wax was so hot it would melt the plastic, with the 800 series the lower temperature wax wouldn't melt or warp the transparencies.

I used to tell people they were "printing with crayons" and take the blocks and doodle little pictures on the paper with them.

I seem to also remember working on some kind of Tek printer that had a sort of plastic ribbon in various colors. I think that was the Phaser 440.

I wonder if you could turn a Phaser printer in to some sort of 3D wax printer if you mounted the print head on to rails and used a stepper motor?

[SeanB]

The 440 is a dye sublimation printer, using a ribbon that was alternating CMY dye sheets that were transferred to the paper by a thermal print head. The 340 print head will be usable as a 3d printer as is, as it is mounted on a rail set, and works by having about 65 nozzles that are used to place a drop of wax on the drum as it turns, then the whole head is stepped to the next column and deposits a new row. Takes about 30 turns of the drum to build up the complete page image on the oiled surface, then the paper feeder picks up a page, heats it up to just short of the wax melting point and feeds it to run in contact to transfer the image. After the page is fed the maintenance tray moves up, contacts the drum with a wiper blade to remove old wax and oil for a turn or three, then moves up further to place a new layer of silicone transfer oil onto the drum with a felting pad fed from a bag of oil.

The only problem is you have to keep the head level, as it has the liquid wax in open topped channels ( with a cover but it relies on the levels to feed the wax to the piezo ejectors) and has a channel arrangement to feed liquid wax down from the PTC and thick film wax ceramic knives. Has a tendency to get clogged heads, so you have a cleaning mode that prints a whole blob of wax into a cleaning cup with a vacuum pump that then deposits it into the maintenance tray. Even has a check for the heads that prints a series of coloured bars with head numbers. Not much use as you cannot clean an individual head, only all at once, and this uses about 1/4 of a block of each colour.

[Stonent]

I do now remember having to empty a waste tray on these printers.

[kriebz]

Another interesting part to look for on new-ish multifunctions and scanners is in the scan assembly, instead of a CCFL bulb and a color sensor, there is a light guide fed by an LED triple and a monochrome sensor.  This is a really neat part and you can PWM your way to any color of the rainbow.

[Drewbie]

A lot of the newer machines have a cpld on-board, wireless, and a JTAG connector.

[SeanB]

Sent 8 of these to the scrapyard today............

Obsolete, no longer in use any more and eclipsed by technology, but they were incredible for the time they were designed, and were heavily used.


DSC00147 by SeanB_ZA, on Flickr

[GrandTheftAuto4life]

I'm interested in the part at 18:40 - 19:27

I don't quite see what it's supposed to do, but I'd like to know...