Jam Frequency

[fixthecopier]

How much is too much? How do you fix a machine that jams every few hundred pages? Today I went for a Ricoh doc feeder call. When I ask how often it jams, she said once today. I mumbled something under my breath, then politely cleaned the like new machine and left. The next jam call on a C454e, I checked the counters. It showed as many as 1300 pages down to 300 pages between jams, all from tray 4. I looked at tray 4 roller through the side door. When I touched the roller, it freely moved. I noticed the clip had come off and the roller was sliding off the one way clutch. Cause and effect, I love it.
A few months ago I had a nightmare call. A Konica 501 with the large tray 3. It had a jam issue and when I started working on it, it got worse. I changed everything and after a few weeks got it to run. A few weeks ago they called and said it was jamming again. I showed up and it was left jammed. The counter said it jammed 3 times in a row. I cleared it and watched it run, and run and run. I left, drove a few miles and got some tea, went back and it was still running. It had done about 1400 2 sided when I left. Last week I was there for their Ricoh and she told me the Konica was jamming again. The counter was showing 300 to 700 pages between jams. I sighed and told her to call back when it got annoying. The machine has 1,800,000 on it, so it may jam a few more times than when it was new. How do you guys deal with such issues. I picked up one customers ream of paper and pointed to where it said 99% jam free. "That means out of a 500 sheet ream, you may get 5 jams" She was deeply thinking about it as I left.

[theengel]

Re: Jam Frequency

A lot of it depends on the machine. On a low volume machine, 1 out of 150 is phenomenal. But on a high volume machine, that could be pretty annoying. I've lost money on calls like that. All you can do is replace the most likely part and then leave with: "This problem is intermittent and the only way to tell if it's fixed is to use it and see what happens. If it keeps jamming that often, we'll come back and replace the next most likely part."

I had a Canon like that, where it would jam every 300 pages. The exit rollers had indents in them (not worn, but manufactured) and the smaller diameter would cause the paper to move slower if the idle rollers were pressed against them too hard. So it was just a matter of releasing the pressure against them (pull back on the spring a little).

Who the hell would have thought of that? Luckily, at the time, I was working for a larger company and my senior tech mentioned it to me.

[jhalfhide]

Re: Jam Frequency

We got repeated callouts for a jam a day on a high volume mono. We knew it was mostly the customer angling for a free replacement. Our argument was that 1 jam every few thousand prints could be poor tray loading and we deemed it acceptable. If a jam only occurs once or twice in the same sort of volume that the machine holds in paper, then I always put it down to loading.

Sometimes you have to do the hard part and front up to the customer and not back down.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[paulrid]

Re: Jam Frequency

I picked up one customers ream of paper and pointed to where it said 99% jam free. "That means out of a 500 sheet ream, you may get 5 jams" She was deeply thinking about it as I left.

Love it I must remember that one for future reference

i like it it when you find something definite like worn rollers, foreign object, broken this or that but when you can run 00's through a machine without a problem it becomes a lot harder. Most of the time it can be put down to user, today I was at a machine constantly jamming but when the paper in the bypass was portrait but someone (who you can never find) had changed the machine not to autodetect but told it paper was landscape, guess what it jams

[MdangerP]

Re: Jam Frequency

I love the customer with the very old, outdated, low volume machine with 4 mil on it that complains about 1 jam every 1000. With doc feed I find a lot of people lazily put the paper on the top, don't close the guides on it and go for it. I just do what I can, sometimes you find a hair wrapped around the feed station or something lol.

[blackcat4866]

Re: Jam Frequency

I sure wish I had an answer to that question.

On document feeders some of it can be explained away as originals are never as pristine, flat, and clean at white copy paper just out of the wrapper.

Volume has a lot to do with it. On segment 3 or less if I can get one jam of 1000 copies, I'm happy. On the production machines I would like to see 8000 between jams. Once the furnace stays on and some of that paper dries out again, maybe we can get back to that. Segment 3 to segment 6, somewhere in-between.

I think we've all gone out on calls like this:
Enduser: It jammed today.
Me: One jam? And the others were fine?

=^..^=

[fixthecopier]

Re: Jam Frequency

The great thing about modern copiers is the jam counter that puts a date and time. I have had the call where the customer said the piece of shit was jamming all the time. I pull the printed meter and said, "well, it says it jammed twice yesterday at 10 in the morning and no more since then." Her coworker says, "Yes, that sounds right"

I remember during my first base contract, I had a problem customer. They had a minolta Di520 and called a lot for it jamming all the time. I would show up, put it in test mode and run 5 or 600 sheets without issue and leave. It was a training center and they were doing a few thousand pages at a time. If it jammed once in a thousand pages, it was jamming once every time they used it. The Master Sargent would talk shit the whole time I was in there. So one day I sat in the parking lot and waited for him to go to lunch. I went in, filled up the machine and started to run. It never stopped. I ran almost an entire case of paper through it witout it stopping and stacked the prints beside the machine. He comes back and ask what is going on and I point to the stack of 4,800 copies that I made. "look , no jams". He was not impressed. He said something, I said something, next thing you know we are nose to nose yelling at each other. One of his men had to separate us.When the contract flipped and he got a new machine, he was the nicest guy ever, waving and saying hello every time he saw me.

[theengel]

Re: Jam Frequency

I wonder if sometimes it happens this way:

Jane has to make 300 copies in the next 5 minutes because her a$$hole boss is breathing down her neck and blaming the company's lack of success entirely on her. She's doing her best, but the originals he gave her are crap, and he keeps coming back every 20 seconds to say, "You got those copies done yet?"

Just when she thinks she's got the job all set up and the copier seems to be doing the bulk of the work fine, she gets a jam. She has to start part of the job over now (maybe because she doesn't realize how the copier will auto correct this stuff). In the middle of all this, the boss pokes his a$$hole face in and says, "What's the problem now?"

Knowing she can't kick her boss in the face because she'll get fired, she takes her anger out on the machine! She says "This stupid thing is jamming now!"

What she didn't count on, was that this, now, is also her fault--because she should have called in the service man... her being psychic and knowing the machine was scheduled to jam just at that point. So now, she does call the service man, and she doesn't have time to calm down and think this through rationally.

Later that day, or even the next day, the service man shows up. She's calm now, but realizes she can't just take back what she said; she'll lose face not just to the service man, but to her coworkers and boss as well. So she sticks with her "this machine is a piece of crap" story.

Every time I deal with a customer who's acting like a PITA, I try to imagine them going through an ordeal like the one above. Suddenly, my frustration melts away to pity--or at least sympathy.

[fixthecopier]

Re: Jam Frequency

I wonder if sometimes it happens this way:



Every time I deal with a customer who's acting like a PITA, I try to imagine them going through an ordeal like the one above. Suddenly, my frustration melts away to pity--or at least sympathy.

I understand that completely. I have a color machine in the command generals office of Special Ops. When they call I drop everything and go. The staff is relieved to see me, because the chief of staff looses his mind when any thing goes wrong and starts yelling at the staff.

[sturmtrooper]

Re: Jam Frequency

On almost all my machines the jam log shows 3-5x as many doc feeder jams as plotter jams. At this point I'm pretty sure it's just regular piss poor loading by customers and them trying to feed mangled paper through it. One doctor office has this poor MP2000 with 475k on it and they've called for ADF jams a few times recently. I've fed stacks upon stacks through the ADF in free run mode and it eats them all. They're scanning in patient charts, which have double hole punches on the top and are frequently dog eared and mangled. Surprise they don't feed for crap, especially when duplexing.

[Lance15]

Re: Jam Frequency

Had a customer call for jamming on some HP M602's. These printers are in a Library that get A LOT of traffic. I find out what the duty cycle is for these printer and find they are FAR exceeding the recommended pages per month, by, like, A LOT!