Bad B/W design..

[Lotec]

Just have to let some steam out

... but is it just me that does not like the smaller B/W Ricohs? Every machine smaller than the 1060 series have stupid weaknesses. I sometimes wonder what the Ricoh engineers was doing at school..

And they keep on improving on a design that should never have seen the light of day.. af1018/2018.... af450/1045/2045/mp4000.. to mention a few..

How hard can it be to design a machine with a decent fuser/developer/PCU unit?
Flimsy fusers and drum units.... and a 60k PM . . come on.. is it a $300 printer we're talking about? It they want a 60k PM, make a cartridge.

Can they not just copy old stuff that have worked fine, or copy from another brand?

I want a fuser that I can open with two screws (and hinges on the other side). The hot roller and the pressure roller should just be to pop out from their bearings that hold them in place.
The heater lamp need a plug in each end. No screw. And just fit a cleaning web like the 2060... just make it totally disposable - so I can throw away the web housing as well. Just keep the motor and gears seperately.
PCU... what can I say. Give me back a corona wire and a grid. Make the drum bigger so it will last longer. Fit it with a brush. and a nice and easy to replace cleaning blade.
Developer... just make a more modern desing of the 1060.. pretty please with sugar on top.
The rest of the machines are good enough for me. Could loose all the clips on the paper feed rollers... but anyway.. that is good enough anyway. Oh yeah.. paper feed. Just use the AF2060 feed on every single machine. No matter it it is making 18 pages a minute or 80.

Arghh!!! anger management anger management .. ..
I'm wasting my time fixing machines with bad design..

They should have a day called: kick the designers ass. Good design = less of a beating
Maybe they would learn and make an effort?

[android790]

If it was easy to maintain, then the machine would be in the field longer. Sooner resale. If it was a better design, then you would not have that broken odd part, piece, or widget that cost much, takes hours to install, and days to get. If you used better material, part replacement resale would go down. Last and not least, it is designed by an engineer who never worked on a copier. Machines on paper never break. I don't know if this is an answer, or just me venting. But, sometimes I see a machine and wonder WTF is the thinking about that.

[mrwho]

Well, I moved from Konica Minolta to Ricoh a while ago, and I must say that, in general, I find the Ricoh machines sturdier and better conceived than KM machines - just try to dismantle the back of a bizhub C250 to reach for a motor and do the same with an MPC2050, you'll see what I mean.

Of course Ricoh machines have some disadvantages that KM don't - namely the fragile fuser parts that you keep breaking, which don't happen with KM machines because they're mostly replaceable as a set - those that aren't often suffer the same problem, just check the drum units of a bizhub 250.

Ricoh's bigger machines, on the other hand, are a joy to work with, but then again so are the KM ones. So I think every brand is guilty of that in one way or another.

[gwaddle]

If I owned a company that designed anything, it would be a rule that no engineer could design anything untill they had spent at least 6 months in the field working on them. I've worked on alot of different machinery over the years, from helicopter to copiers and the engineers don't use anymore common sense no matter what they design. I'd really like to see some feedback from design engineers on this.

[Stirton.M]

I agree gwaddle. All design engineers should be put out in the field once in a while, just to gain some perspective on what they are designing.

mrwho, I've been frustrated by what you speak of about KMs regarding screws. But on the plus side, the number of times I had to physically open up a machine to get that deep into it are rare relative to the majority of calls I will do on the small hardware. In stark contrast to the office machines, the C6500 and 1050 are amazingly easy to work on, relatively speaking.

My only desire is for metal parts to replace some of the plastic guides and sensor flags.

[jonezy999]

Dunno how much truth is in this, but I heard once before that Ricoh engineer/design teams work on a set unit ie. fuser, pcu or whatever, then after how ever long, the teams swap to different units. I think its to allow for more fresh ideas.

If this is really the case, I must say, I dont like it. Why change a good thing??

[zed255]

I don't like the idea of engineers switching around. I think if the team is actually split by design area then they should become the consummate expert on that given area. I do think however that they should, assuming they don't already, go out and get some examples of other manufacturers machines and incorporate the best ideas regardless of origin. Why rely solely on your own engineers when you gan leverage the engineering from the entire industry. Give it just enough of a twist to make it 'your own', but not so much as to pervert the original concept.

[Stirton.M]

Your idea works in theory zed, but you need to keep in mind that delving into this could set off patent lawsuits for certain design ideas. Granted, in this industry there is a hell of a lot of overlap in the technology, nothing really new out there.

[mrwho]

I think the problem would be solved if they listened to the techs on the field once in a while, instead of keeping themselves safe in their dreamworld where machines never break, customers are all top notch and the working conditions are unbeatable.

Reminds me of a story another tech told me about Konica (before the Minolta merger) when the brand sent out a modification for some machine based on a DIY mod the techs in the field adopted - years after the first tech found out how to solve it and reported it to the factory (don't ask me what the mod was, I don't remember). To me, this one is a success story. I wonder how many problems are solved by some tech at some remote site and reported to the factory, just to be discarded and never gets to our knowledge. That's why I love this site, free of the brand's filtering.

[Shadow1]

I can't tell you how many times I've said this: Engineers need to be arrested and sentenced to work on their own products.

I also couldn't agree more that the smaller Ricoh machines are more of a pain to work on than they need to be.

Other things are just outright stupidity, and I'm speaking of any machine that uses B296 developer. This stuff has been despised to death, buried, and resurrected so we can hate it some more. HOW UTTERLY STUPID DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO KEEP USING IT IN NEW MACHINES WHEN IT HAS BEEN PROVEN OVER AND OVER TO BE THE PROBLEM.

[kingpd@businessprints.net]

They could really learn from the Kitchen Aid model. Their stand mixers with the bowls have been very similar since 1919. They pride themselves on the fact that a mixer from 1919 or from 2010 can all use the same attachments. I can attest to their worldwide reliability. I have one in my kitchen that was my grandmothers...it's older than me and still whips up cake, cookie dough, and frosting like it was new out of the box.

Now I know a mixer and a copier are very different, but the make it to break it philosophy needs to change. They should get one awesome design down and keep it and make it extremely reliable. Oh, but that will put the technicians out of business you say. Well I doubt it. There will still be maintenance, installs, deinstalls, upgrades, etc. Perhaps it will make our jobs easier. And if it means less technicians required, oh well, there's plenty of other fun things out there to do and at least we won't be fixing garbage.

Who knows, if people started getting real brand loyalty b/c of awesome quality, that might actually ensure more work for us and we won't have to work as hard trying to sell crappy crap to a customer. I found it interesting that all the women who have kitchen aid mixers typically end up buying one for their children, and so on and so on...it's like free marketing and easy sales...

[mrwho]

The "make it to break" philosophy doesn't work for me. If I buy something and it breaks shortly after the warranty expires, I avoid it like the plague and go to the competition instead. One example: HP USB flatbed scanners.

[banginbishop]

ALL m/c's are built to a price and that doesnt include how long an engineer takes to fix it. If the manufacture designed it for engineers then the cost would be passed to the end user. End user looks at the price against another brand and says its cheaper with brand x- why? because brand x built the m/c with price in mind, maximum profit not engineer freindly.

[Lotec]

Yeah, I agree about the quality here. I find it hard to believe that they can not make them better or last longer - or be more service friendly.

There is really difference between models too. I see Kyocera models that have a service interval at about 300K, and Ricoh models that have 90K. If you live in a country where man hours cost a lot - it is important to have longer service intervals. See the smaller b/w Ricoh MP 2500 series, and a Kyocera TaskAlfa 300i as an example.

If a machine starts to need to much service - we have to scrap it. We fill up those electronics recycling containers quite often. Even if they recycle it, it is not good for the environment.

Make it better so it lasts longer, and just make parts upgradeable. If there comes a new print controller, they should have the option to buy it - but keep the finisher, paperbanks, document feeder, large capasity trays and what not.

It would be easy for the manufacturer to be able to make the same parts year after year. It they think they could make it bettet they should make a swappable part (if that is a english word at all?).
They should just make a super advanced toner bottle that is really hard to duplicate so they keep the toner profit. They would also still sell spare parts. When things get old - they will fall apart once in a while. And don't forget the customers. They will mess up, and break stuff or do some othe stupid things that will result in a service call.

A friend of mine worked for a while as a tech, but started up a copy shop. For him it is a principle to keep stuff working as long as possible. Not just for the money, but like me he really enjoy to see the machines work longer and do more then they were designed for. He sets up print jobs so they will start late in the evening too - and he usually takes a trip to the shop at night to fill up with paper so the machine can continue working when he sleeps. By spreading the workload he can get really high production volume - and still have a fairly healthy machine with no drum fatigue.
And if you like to have a few technical challenges, a really hard working machine gives you some interesting problems once in a while. On the other hand... they usually work really well. Often better than machines that is used at 5-10 % of what it's supposed to handle.
I guess that the paper is always fresh. After all it will just stay in the tray for an hour or so. The users are more professional too - so they focus on PM messages in the display, and to buy a quality paper, and just treat the machine better.

I've studied mechatronics and physics and I see they have used some (too me) fairly advanced science behind a lot of the constructions. And then suddenly they have used some shitty material not right for the job at all - and I wonder if they failed material science at school.
Just yesterday I pulled a transferbelt from a HP printer apart - just to see how it was constructed. And I see a simple plastic bushing/clip combination for a charge roller, and thinks to myself: ahh that was a simple but clever construction. I would never have thought about that. But other times I see really lame constructions that either make things more complex and fidly then they need to be, or just plain dumb. Just think of all the major or minor problems that occur with a new model. They can not test them enough at the factory before they are released to customers.
It you line up 20 copiers, and have 10 techs and 10 customers copy 2-3 million pages on it - and see how it fails, how often and which parts that fail time and time again.. they have to learn something from this? They should also test the machines in differens temperatures and humidity levels.
Just thinking about the Ricoh MPC charge roller problem..
If it is so hard to make a roller that works.. just drop it. Use a charge corona wire and a ozone filter. The wire/grid and ozone filter could come with the toner bottle - so the dustomer could change them - or make them last longer and have a tech doing the job.
Or they could study why the Kyocera TaskAlfa machines works really well with charge rollers.
What happende to industrial espionage :-)
And why don't they stick with a good solid construction? I worked on an analogue Minolta that had a paper feed machanism (and rollers) that lastet about 1 million pages. I cleaned it if I was on a service call - but I never had to replace it. And then they released a new digital copier, with a new cheaper paper feed mechanism? and by far not as good.

If they want things to last a short period of time - make it into a user replaceable cartridge. And make the rest of the machines with big, solid and tech replaceable parts.

[kingpd@businessprints.net]

Oh I hear you there and agree. I think it mostly comes down to profits. They want something cheap and disposable after a few years of use.

Now anyone that knows me knows I'm not the biggest fan of Xerox, but I will give credit where it is due. I loved the fact that for many many years, they made the toners mostly all the same in a series. So if you upgraded you could probably keep your old toners and parts. The toners were even the same for a large speed and volume range too. Now Xerox's position was probably that they wanted them to be that way b/c they can manufacturer them for cheaper and they sell direct on cpc programs so they didn't want customers throwing out their "old" Xerox toners and parts.

The reality is there are just too many dealers and too many manufacturers of these now commodity products. This has flooded the market and encouraged cheap and sh*tty quality. About the only really new innovation I see anymore is in the color arena. But even there it's not really innovative. So you made a color copier print 5 times as fast as before. Big f*ckin' deal. Or you made a b/w device that can now go tens of millions of pages. Who cares, that's how they should have been made to begin with.