Desperate plea: help with problematic Ricoh CL7000. Local professionals have failed!

[104HeatonRoad]

Hi there,

My apologies for being an amateur on a site for professionals, and for my first post being a plea for help! I have done some serious googling on this and your forum is the only place that looks even remotely helpful:

I'm a designer that runs a Ricoh CL7000 in a small office---it has run fantastically for the year or so I have had it and I although I bought it used I have always tried to maintain it as well as possible. It has had fresh toner, fuser oil unit, a developer, and is regularly cleaned and maintained. Today when I switched it on it made some groaning noises while starting up, so I took out the PCUs, developers and fuser unit to see if I could see any problems. The only thing I found was that one of the small, sprung plastic guide that presses against the fuser rollers was a bit out of shape, so I lined it back up. It has scored the roller it was pressed against ever so slightly, but other than that seems fine. I put everything back in place and the printer started to throw up a 'Remove misfeed in Fuser unit: B' message. There is no paper anywhere in the printer and no misfeed, but I just cannot get it past this problem. Everything seems happy but it won't startup past this. I have called a few loacl printer repair engineers and they have shyed away from dealing with it, citing that they don't deal with colour Ricohs.

Can anyone please help? I love this printer, it's important to my business that it works, and I really can't afford a new one that would achieve anything like the results I get from it. I am a techie guy and so am happy to give anything a shot that you could suggest. Please! If anyone knows of any pros that are available locally to me (I'm in Newcastle upon tyne, UK) I'd be more than happy to use their services, if not I'm desperate to give it a shot myself---anything to get me back up and running!

Many thanks in advance.
Adam

[Eric1968]

I think the part you lined up is one of the stripper pawls. Maybe while doing that, you touched the exit sensor lever in such way that the machine thinks that there is paper jammed there. The paper touches this lever when it leaves the fusing unit.

The noise can be caused by the cleaning unit on the transfer belt, or the transfer belt itself.

[Iommanxman]

I will agree with Eric. Allthough one thing to think about. If you do re-seat the exit sensor on the fusing unit. You still have a scored fusing belt. My suggestion would be to just order a new fusing unit and replace the whole thing. That would solve your jamming message and the crap prints you are going to get out of it once you do fix the error message.

Also I have had problems with the transfer belt cleaning blade on these machine's whining. Just needs a good hoover out of the transfer belt cleaning assembly and stick it all back together.

Fusing Unit EDP code - 400877

Hope this helps.

[104HeatonRoad]

Hi everyone. Well, the printer has been troublesome since fixing---it worked great for a while but has now started to stain the paper with black toner pretty badly, and print inconsistently. I tried to carry out colour registration and fuser adjustment but the printer keeps saying 'failed'. This usually means I'm short on toner right? This is doing my head in now!

[Iommanxman]

The marks you are getting on the page will be from the score in the fusing belt (the big red thing that the stripper pawl was pressing against). You need to replace the fusing unit.

[104HeatonRoad]

Hi guys. Well, the news is that I bought a donor printer very cheaply to pillage for parts and would now be running away very happily if it wasn't for the printer failing to auto adjust fuser for thick paper and adjust colour registration. The consumer manual claims that this is due to low toner---it is seeing the yellow as low even though it is almost brand new! Is there any way I can force these adjustments through the service codes? I am on a deadline and my colour is all over the place! I appreciate that I am asking a lot from everyone here, but I really have nowhere else to go! I bought a service manual and it is of no help on this one! Thanks in advance, Adam

[Iommanxman]

You cannot perform Fuser adjustment or colour registration adjustments while the machine is in a "request state". Are you using genuine Ricoh toner? If you are using genuine toner and you have tried replacing the toner and it is still asking for it. This sounds like the classic on these machine's where the toner pump fails and needs replacing which is a bitch of a job to do! The only colour adjustment worth doing is the colour registration through user tools. I have in the past tried turning off Line adjustment in service mode but this only resolves the issue for 100 prints or so then the error returns saying "colour registration error".

All in all, my advice would be to ensure you have replaced the fusing unit as previously stated, replace the yellow toner and perform a colour registration adjustment in user tools.

Hope this helps.

[collme]

you say you have contacted a few local engineers, have you tried calling ricoh for a service call as i am sure they will not say they don't do ricoh colour. i know it is an old machine but still fixable.