markham@rho.cs.unc.edu (Andrew Markham) (10/10/89)
My sister goes to grad school in Missouri and asked me a question for a friend that I have never heard of before (I work for UNC-CH Computer Science Dept and we have ~50 IW IIs and no one has ever heard of this problem). When he (friend of sister) prints to his Imagewriter, occasionally it will stop at ~1/4 of a page and the print head will burn a hole through the ribbon causing him to buy and replace many ribbons. This had happened to him about 18 months ago and the on-campus repair shop replaced the print head for $39. Since it has started back up again he went back to the repair shop and now they want $110 to replace the printhead. This didn't sound right to me. I was wondering if anyone of you have ever had or witnessed this type of problem. Could this guy just have a lemon? Please respond via e-mail (I read the newsgroup daily, but don't think there are many others interested) and I will post results if so desired. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Andrew W. Markham <markham@sunmail.cs.unc.edu> Computer Science Department UNC-CH "Nobody in the world can cover my main man Michael Jordan. No, No, Nooobody." - Mars Blackmon
truesdel@ics.uci.edu (Scott Truesdell) (10/11/89)
What's happening is that the ribbon is failing to advance in the cartridge.
This can be due to :
1. Not seating the cartridge well into its saddle.
2. Cheap loose-mesh ribbons trapping a printhead wire and causing
the ribbon to stall while the other print wires burn away.
3. Damaged ribbon transport mechanism, augmented by #2 possibly.
If it's not too late (#3), make sure that #1 and #2 are not the cause.
You can tell if the ribbon is too loose a weave if you can see daylight
through it.
I safegard against #1 by always moving the print cartridge back and forth
and observing the ribbon advance mechanism at work (or if it's in bad
lighting, FEELing the ribbon advance.
Hope this helps.
--scott
--
Scott Truesdell