Bad B/W design..

[Lotec]

Just have to let some steam out

... but is it just me that does not like the smaller B/W Ricohs? Every machine smaller than the 1060 series have stupid weaknesses. I sometimes wonder what the Ricoh engineers was doing at school..

And they keep on improving on a design that should never have seen the light of day.. af1018/2018.... af450/1045/2045/mp4000.. to mention a few..

How hard can it be to design a machine with a decent fuser/developer/PCU unit?
Flimsy fusers and drum units.... and a 60k PM . . come on.. is it a $300 printer we're talking about? It they want a 60k PM, make a cartridge.

Can they not just copy old stuff that have worked fine, or copy from another brand?

I want a fuser that I can open with two screws (and hinges on the other side). The hot roller and the pressure roller should just be to pop out from their bearings that hold them in place.
The heater lamp need a plug in each end. No screw. And just fit a cleaning web like the 2060... just make it totally disposable - so I can throw away the web housing as well. Just keep the motor and gears seperately.
PCU... what can I say. Give me back a corona wire and a grid. Make the drum bigger so it will last longer. Fit it with a brush. and a nice and easy to replace cleaning blade.
Developer... just make a more modern desing of the 1060.. pretty please with sugar on top.
The rest of the machines are good enough for me. Could loose all the clips on the paper feed rollers... but anyway.. that is good enough anyway. Oh yeah.. paper feed. Just use the AF2060 feed on every single machine. No matter it it is making 18 pages a minute or 80.

Arghh!!! anger management anger management .. ..
I'm wasting my time fixing machines with bad design..

They should have a day called: kick the designers ass. Good design = less of a beating
Maybe they would learn and make an effort?

[android790]

If it was easy to maintain, then the machine would be in the field longer. Sooner resale. If it was a better design, then you would not have that broken odd part, piece, or widget that cost much, takes hours to install, and days to get. If you used better material, part replacement resale would go down. Last and not least, it is designed by an engineer who never worked on a copier. Machines on paper never break. I don't know if this is an answer, or just me venting. But, sometimes I see a machine and wonder WTF is the thinking about that.

[mrwho]

Well, I moved from Konica Minolta to Ricoh a while ago, and I must say that, in general, I find the Ricoh machines sturdier and better conceived than KM machines - just try to dismantle the back of a bizhub C250 to reach for a motor and do the same with an MPC2050, you'll see what I mean.

Of course Ricoh machines have some disadvantages that KM don't - namely the fragile fuser parts that you keep breaking, which don't happen with KM machines because they're mostly replaceable as a set - those that aren't often suffer the same problem, just check the drum units of a bizhub 250.

Ricoh's bigger machines, on the other hand, are a joy to work with, but then again so are the KM ones. So I think every brand is guilty of that in one way or another.

[gwaddle]

If I owned a company that designed anything, it would be a rule that no engineer could design anything untill they had spent at least 6 months in the field working on them. I've worked on alot of different machinery over the years, from helicopter to copiers and the engineers don't use anymore common sense no matter what they design. I'd really like to see some feedback from design engineers on this.

[Stirton.M]

I agree gwaddle. All design engineers should be put out in the field once in a while, just to gain some perspective on what they are designing.

mrwho, I've been frustrated by what you speak of about KMs regarding screws. But on the plus side, the number of times I had to physically open up a machine to get that deep into it are rare relative to the majority of calls I will do on the small hardware. In stark contrast to the office machines, the C6500 and 1050 are amazingly easy to work on, relatively speaking.

My only desire is for metal parts to replace some of the plastic guides and sensor flags.

[jonezy999]

Dunno how much truth is in this, but I heard once before that Ricoh engineer/design teams work on a set unit ie. fuser, pcu or whatever, then after how ever long, the teams swap to different units. I think its to allow for more fresh ideas.

If this is really the case, I must say, I dont like it. Why change a good thing??

[zed255]

I don't like the idea of engineers switching around. I think if the team is actually split by design area then they should become the consummate expert on that given area. I do think however that they should, assuming they don't already, go out and get some examples of other manufacturers machines and incorporate the best ideas regardless of origin. Why rely solely on your own engineers when you gan leverage the engineering from the entire industry. Give it just enough of a twist to make it 'your own', but not so much as to pervert the original concept.

[Stirton.M]

Your idea works in theory zed, but you need to keep in mind that delving into this could set off patent lawsuits for certain design ideas. Granted, in this industry there is a hell of a lot of overlap in the technology, nothing really new out there.

[mrwho]

I think the problem would be solved if they listened to the techs on the field once in a while, instead of keeping themselves safe in their dreamworld where machines never break, customers are all top notch and the working conditions are unbeatable.

Reminds me of a story another tech told me about Konica (before the Minolta merger) when the brand sent out a modification for some machine based on a DIY mod the techs in the field adopted - years after the first tech found out how to solve it and reported it to the factory (don't ask me what the mod was, I don't remember). To me, this one is a success story. I wonder how many problems are solved by some tech at some remote site and reported to the factory, just to be discarded and never gets to our knowledge. That's why I love this site, free of the brand's filtering.

[Shadow1]

I can't tell you how many times I've said this: Engineers need to be arrested and sentenced to work on their own products.

I also couldn't agree more that the smaller Ricoh machines are more of a pain to work on than they need to be.

Other things are just outright stupidity, and I'm speaking of any machine that uses B296 developer. This stuff has been despised to death, buried, and resurrected so we can hate it some more. HOW UTTERLY STUPID DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO KEEP USING IT IN NEW MACHINES WHEN IT HAS BEEN PROVEN OVER AND OVER TO BE THE PROBLEM.