I was able to pick up a refurbed Dell 3100cn printer for my Sister a few weeks ago for only $244 online w/ free shipping. Today Jen and I lugged it's 95lbs box out to her house to set it up and get rid of that crappy ink jet HP she's been suffering with for so long. Now I'm still working the kinks out of the system, and I didn't have a whole lot of time to play with it, but something interesting did happen. We got the thing all assembled, and on top of it's tray 1 base. Put all the color toner cartridges in....and everything seemed to be good to go, but for some reason it wouldn't print. It just kept saying paper jam in tray 1 no matter what we tried. We added more paper, took out some, swapped paper types....didn't matter, it just always said paper jam. Of course there never was any type of paper jam anywhere. At first we thought that I had missed a piece of tape or something, but we couldn't find anything. So after looking at the tray for a while, and how it integrates into the mechanism it finally occurred what was wrong. Turns out each side of the tray has a spring loaded "plate" the paper sits on, which in turns pushes up the paper with tension against the rubber roller that feeds the printer. Well it turns out that 1 of the 2 small white plastic bumpers that release the spring (when the tray is fully inserted) had vanished. The left one was there all by itself, but the right one was missing. With that realized, Jen remembered seeing something like that lying around in the box. I sketched a quick pic of it:
Now that we had it, the reason why it fell off was pretty clear. If you look at the pics, the dotted lines indicate where the clip was when we found it. So obviously putting it back on wasn't gonna be a long term solution, so what next? Glue? Tape? Zip ties? None of those sound like really good ideas if you think about it. In fact the best option is to heat the plastic and remold it back to proper shape, but how? If you've ever worked with plastic in the past you'll know the difficulties of heating it to just the right temp to avoid burn, yet achieve relative fluidity. Turns out the solution was quite easy. Hold it up to a light bulb, against the glass of it for about 3 minutes. A little light pressure and it bent back into shape....actually a little bit farther than originally, so honestly now it's tighter than it ever was. What makes this post worthy? The damn thing is 95lbs, and the size of a small refrigerator. It scares me to think what calling tech support, or trying to RMA that thing would have been like. All because of some cheap .001 cent part... Now if you'll excuse me, we're very busy around there writing the next great American novel. The working title is: I lick my own butt.