Hp Laserjet 2100 Feeding Partial Pages
My favorite laser printers of all time are the HP LaserJet 2100 series, of which I have two. I've had them since the late 1990s and use them a lot. They print at very high resolution for a laser (1200 X 1200 dpi) and don't take up a great deal of room. The toner cartridges are expensive, but I've never seen their kind of quality on any other desktop printer.
Alas, about a year ago paper feed started to get flaky, especially from the front tray. Stack duplexing became impossible, and I had to feed the front tray one sheet at a time. This worked, but I had to be careful not to let the printer think the front tray was empty, lest it start feeding from the main tray instead. I got aggravated enough to go looking for some sort of fix, and found just the thing: A repair kit from laserprinterkits.com that included replacement paper feed parts (two pads and two rollers) plus a CD full of short videos explaining how to do the repair. The package cost me about $35 with shipping, and I just finished testing the repaired printer.
The good news is that it feeds paper perfectly again, just like it did when it came out of the box in 1998. The bad news is that the repair process itself was pretty gnarly. The LJ 2100 was not designed for easy paper-feed repair. To get to the roller and pad behind the front tray, you have to practically strip the printer to the bare frames. The bulk of the video clips that come with the kit (all in .wmv format) explain how to dismantle the printer and then put it back together again. Changing the pads and rollers takes maybe 2 minutes the first time, being extra careful. The rest of the time (for me, about two hours) is spent getting to that point, and back out again with a working printer.
The videos were critical to accomplishing the repair. They were quite well-done, and I set up a workstation using a folding table next to the PC where I played the videos. I could swing my chair around from the video (on the smaller LCD toward the left, above) to the printer (that naked black thing on the right) without moving very far. I put all the removed screws in little bins in groups, by repair steps, to keep them from getting confused. I had no difficulties.
However, remember that I worked as a repair tech on Xerox copiers for two and a half years (admittedly over thirty years ago, but paper is still paper) and have always been good with tools and mechanical gimcrackery. If you don't know which end of a screwdriver to grab, this repair is not for you. Here and there are little plastic hold-down clips that have to be pried aside to remove a panel or an assembly, and if you don't have a gut-sense for what the plastic can take, you can easily crack them off and ruin the printer. Lining up the motor drive assembly (below) back onto the frame took some jiggling and some sense for how gears mesh and (worse) how to know that they're meshed when you can't see them. Then, of course, there is the simple danger of stripping out a plastic hole by torquing a screw too tight.
I'd say that if you've changed out a PC power supply or several different types of disk drives, you probably have the screwdriver skills to handle the repair. Add to that some caution, patience, and a willingness to follow directions precisely, and you can do it. The company is laserprinterkits.com. The LJ 2100 kit was $32 plus shipping. They have similar kits for most other popular HP lasers. I have a misfeeding LJ 5L in a box downstairs that I intend to bring back to life, and I'm going to have another LJ 2100 kit on the shelf for when my other LJ 2100 printer (currently on bivouac in Chicago) starts to misbehave. I love these little boxes, and I will keep them pumping as long as I can. If you have the skills, the kits are highly recommended.
Source: https://jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com/18357.html
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