Can I use this paper?

**blackcat4866** · 10-29-2011

I can't believe that I haven't thought of this yet. Maybe my brain cells just had to ferment for the proper number of decades.

Tuesday I had a gentleman hand me a piece of paper and say "Can I run this through my printer?" I started down the usual line of questioning:
Do you have the package? No.
Do you know where you bought it? No.
Do you know a brand name or anything at all about it? No.
I started by looking up the specs on this particular printer (max 163 g/m2), and started on my little patented speech about paper types, measurements,... blah, blah, blah.

Then I thought: hmmm, grams per meter squared. I can figure out how many meters squared (letter = 0.060264 m2, A4 = 0.0625 m2). I can weigh grams. Why not? So I brought home a paper sample and weighed it on my jewelers scale. It's 11.5 grams/0.060264 m2 = 190.8 g/m2

Nope. Too heavy, literally.

The jewelers scale is accurate to 1/10th of a gram, which is plenty accurate for weighing paper (or loose tea, as I use it at home).

Then I thought: Wouldn't it be convenient if my paper conversion chart had a couple extra columns to list the grams/page of the common 4 or 5 sizes? So I did it. Wouldn't it be even better if I could pick standard paper sizes out of a drop down menu, enter a paper weight in g/m2, and have the spreadsheet fill in the grams per page. I confess, I got carried away. Wikipedia had specs on over 100 standard paper sizes. I only included 70 of those.

Most of us only use 4 or 5 standard paper sizes. Who knew there was a paper size called Double Demy or Elephant? Enjoy! =^..^=

**JR2ALTA** · 10-29-2011

Had customer running "gum paper" i said wtf is "gum paper"?

It's basically labels with no peel off site. Just slap it on cardboard box or whatever.

It jams in fuser.

Sales said they could run it.

For Pete sake

Oddly, they ha it going for a year or so, just caught them in a big "gum run"

**Hansoon** · 10-29-2011

Thanks Cat for that very nice chart.

or loose tea, as I use it at home

You mean really tea or just grass?

Hans

**blackcat4866** · 10-29-2011

Really, tea. I'm a closet tea enthusiast.

Back in college I hung around with a group of guys that drank gallons of extremely strong cheap tea. We would put a 1qt saucepan on the stove, on low heat. Add water. Throw in 12 or 15 of the cheapest generic orange pekoe tea bags. Simmer all day.

As it was served, we added more water. When the conversation got too animated the water boiled down, and the tea bags would start to smoke and burn. At this point it was too disgusting for me, and I'd chisel out the tea bags and charcoal crust, and start with fresh supplies.

Mostly it was just a massive caffeine infusion. One lump or two? No, not sugar. Tea.

Fast forward two decades later. I discovered that tea does not have to be a corrosive infusion of caffeine, but can actually taste good.

It would be perfectly all right if you used your grass scale, Hans. =^..^=

**blackcat4866** · 10-29-2011

Originally Posted by JR2ALTA

Had customer running "gum paper" i said wtf is "gum paper"?

It's basically labels with no peel off site. Just slap it on cardboard box or whatever.

It jams in fuser.

Sales said they could run it.

For Pete sake

Oddly, they ha it going for a year or so, just caught them in a big "gum run"

You surely never know what kind of media the customer is going to run.

A couple of years back, there was a string of calls on the desktop Samsung color printers. People were buying these little beauties to print photos. They'd load up some nice glossy inkjet paper. It would wrap on the fuser roller, and that was it. On a couple of them it was the very first print made on the new machine. For a while I had the media specs printed off by the front desk, so I could point out "no inkjet paper". Nope. Warranty does not cover inkjet paper jams and the resulting fuser replacement. =^..^=

**mojorolla** · 11-01-2011

We had an elementary school that ran construction paper through there machine all the time. They had a very high call right, but the most colorful paper dust I had ever seen. It was like cleaning up after a rainbow.

**Ianizer** · 11-01-2011

Now you're thinking, Gato!

I had this epiphany not long ago, myself.
The rest must understand, this doesn't help with the customer that persists in running inkjet stock, flour tortillas & toilet paper... But it is nice to figure the spec weight on unlabeled stock.

I have a customer who runs a lot of bulk packed paper with lots of helpful information on the box like, "12 pt. Lot 8"... Really?!

So it hit me: Grams per meter squared... Hey that's metric! I can do this.

Really all you need is a postal scale. You don't need NASA tolerances... Weight several sheets and divide the weight by the number of sheets (obviously, the more sheets the more precise the measure. I like 10 or so). Better yet, if you know the fixed number in a ream, weight the whole package.

Here's my formula:

z/(x•y)=gm2

whereas:
z=weight in grams
x=length in meters
y=width in meters

conversion:
1mm = .001m
1in. = .0254m
1oz. = 28.349g

Tip: Convert values to meters & grams prior to calculating

---

Test the formula.
A 500-sheet ream of 8.5x11 letter-size 20# bond weighs approx. 5 pounds (or 80 ounces).

-I

**prntrfxr** · 11-01-2011

Brilliant post, guys!

According to your equation: z/(x*y)=gm2 (where z is gram weight, x is length in meters, and y is width in meters)
and your example: 500 sheet ream of 20# 8.5x11 paper weighing 80 grams

I came up with the following:

z/(x*y) = g/m2
(80*28.349)/(11*.0254)*(8.5*.0254) = g/m2
2267.961/(0.27948*0.2159) = g/m2
2267.961/0.060322 = g/m2
37597.29 = g/m2

At first, I thought this was wrong, but I forgot

that this was for an entire ream and if you divide by 500 sheets you get:

75.19458 = g/m2

According to chart on Wikipedia (Paper density - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

20 lb paper has a grammage of 75.20 g/m2. So the math was correct. This was fun! Thanks Blackcat for this post and Ianizer for the fun equation. (Math was not my strong point in school, but I loved Science...and History and Literature.)

It was much more fun than calculating capacitive reactance (Xc=1/ [2 pi f C]) without a calculator, let me tell you (we weren't allowed to round pi either).