Originally Posted by
jsulliva
If you remove the PCUs from the printer and look at the surface below where they sit, you will see a large metal sheet divided with separating rails that position the PCUs. In the middle of each of these areas is a long narrow slot, about 1 inch (25 MM) wide by 10 inches (250 MM), perhaps a little longer (I am writing from memory and not looking at one at the moment). The closed shutter plate assembly is visible through these slots. When the printer is operating, the plate moves and the shutter openings align so the laser can shine through the slots and through the large plate and through the corresponding slot in the bottom of each PCU and onto the photo-conducting material in the PCU. The shutters are a large plate with slits as part of a larger Shutter Assembly (tray with shutter plate). On the bottom of the shutter plate, around each shutter slot, is a felt wiper/seal. These are attached via glue. In my case, the glue was letting go and a portion of some of the wipers were lying across the window which was partially obstructing the laser beam on its way to the PCU.
My printer had sat in a warehouse in Texas (very hot in summer here), probably not Air Conditioned, for quite some time, so perhaps this led to the glue failure. A first attempt at repair (didn't have part on hand) was to simply remove the felt wipers.
This was not completely satisfactory as little bits of felt and glue tended to flake off after that (didn't take shutter assembly completely apart to clean it).
Also, they are also wiper, intended to remove any contaminants that get on the glass, so over time this would become an issue as well.
Perhaps someone who works on these will comment if the glue failure is a common problem as they age.
After a short while it became clear there was still a problem, so the repairman ordered a new shutter assembly.
In parts manual, this is G102-1990 "Cover: Optical Housing: Ass'y".
It was not too expensive, IIRC about $40 new from a local company that services Ricoh Printers. The work to replace it was an hour or more by a knowledgeable repair technician and involved taking a good bit of the machine apart, mostly from the Right Side.
After putting it back together, we had to manually force it to run its 2 calibration programs (second one first) through the Console in Service Mode as the colors were off until we did so. Running the first listed calibration program always got an error and didn't fix things, until we ran the second and then the first and it worked.
I hope that answers your questions and can help you.
John
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