A year or 2 ago, I had a call to look at a Designjet 800. They had damaged the usb port, so I changed the electronic module. Plotter worked fine. About 6 months ago while I was fixing the copier, one of the soldiers said something about their plotter having a problem and did I want to look at it. "Well, not really" as I was really busy.
About 3 months ago they called in a ticket to the shop for an estimate.
When I walked in, at first glance, my first words were "What The Fuck?" That's when my Spider Sense started going off. The carriage was laying on top of the high quality photo paper, wit a big smear of all of the inks on the paper. I picked up the carriage, it flopped up and down.
"What happened?"..."We don't know." That is when another alarm should have went off in my head. I look at the carriage and ask myself "Shouldn't there be some kind of bushings in here?"
"So, you guys don't have any idea?" "Well I think there was a problem with the belt sir." I look at the belt, it looks great. So, I left and called my plotter support guy, Eddie. After describing what I saw, Eddie says he has never heard of such, the carriage must be broken. So I give them a quote to replace the carriage, with 1 hour labor. About a month later they called and approved the est. and I ordered the part.
I go back to put it in. As I grabbed one end to pull it out, I noticed the cover was loose. When I started to remove screws, there was only 1 out of 4 or 5 that should have been there. The other covers were also missing a lot of screws. As I am commenting out loud that something is wrong here the young lady sitting at a desk next to it, now volunteers some information. It seems that some of the soldiers made an attempt at fixing it. As she is telling me this, I am looking down in the cleaning section and seeing a metal part about the size of my finger, just laying there. I later identified it as belonging on the carriage, NEAR THE BUSHINGS THEY HAD REMOVED AND THROWN AWAY! They made no attempt to align the belt, just popped it on. All in all the thing that amazed me the most was that aside from mangling the ends of the encoder strip, they didn't fuck anything else up. I had it print a config page, and am waiting for a new control panel.
My regret is that if I had known they had taken it apart, I would have tripled my labor charge. Every time I let my guard down, they get me.
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