Alas big printer…

…we knew ye well.

After using enough paper to cover two football fields and enough ink to put an inch deep puddle in a cast iron bathtub, the big poster printer at work has kicked up heels and gone to join the choir invisible.

With symptoms similar to its sad predecessor, the poster printer started to have recurring paper jams a couple of days ago. I found out about it this morning when the guys at the hospital office called up to tell me that it was just plain not working anymore. It’d given them an error message about print heads first, so they tried swapping those out, but that didn’t help at all.

So I packed up and headed over post-haste with the office parking permit, hoping to take advantage of the “Business Vehicle Only” spots at the hospital. Unfortunately, they were all taken. Including the ones by the construction area and the ones by Markley… So I wound up digging as much change as I could out of the cup holders and getting 39 minutes on a metered spot near the old observatory.

When I got into the office, I was able to see that the flexible belt which moves the print heads back and forth was in really bad shape. It had started to literally disintegrate, leaving little flecks of rubber all over the inside of the printer. These basically meant that the print heads were pausing and binding up on their rail, kind of like they’d do if the paper was folded up under them, which is why the paper jam error was being triggered. I tried cleaning up the rails and the detritus under the drive belt (basically hopeing that we could coax another day or two of work out of it while we called in a repair shop), but the poor overtaxed thing just came apart.

So.

For a couple of days at least, we’re going to be taking our poster prints out, but that’s likely to change. I called HP and was told that their standard price for on-site, next-day repair for one of these printers was $1500… With our work volume, that’ll pay for itself in less than a week.

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