Bad B/W design..

[Stirton.M]

I see this "cheapness" on some consumable items with KM....well, practically every QMS product for certain, and a few of those C-XX countertop things....complete garbage all of them. Thankfully I work on the large production lines more than the little guys...otherwise, I might go postal on those machines whenever I saw them.

Changing an OACB board in a C65xx is no treat....a lot of hardware has to be pulled out of the way before you can even get at the cage this board is in...

I liked the concept of how a C450, if I wanted to fix the MFP or fax and so on, the cage was an easy removal, relatively speaking. But even that has its drawbacks and is not universal.

[mrwho]

One of the things that awestruck me when I moved from KM to Ricoh was the abysmal difference between accessing the back of (for example) a KM C250 and an Aficio MPC2050.

On the KM, you need to take out a gazillion screws, three or four covers, five or six connectors, take out the controller cage and then you have access to the HV board - which you need to take out if you want to access the gears in the back. Pure nightmare!

On the Ricoh, you take out the back covers, two connectors, three screws and the controller cage has a hinge that makes it open like a door - first time I saw that I thought I was in engineer heaven!

[Lotec]

Yeah. . it's obvious that the designer don't work on the machines themselves.

You see the same thing with cars. I had an old Volvo from 1987 a few years back. That car was a dream to service. I could change the oil filter without even going under the car at all. I changed the timingbelt in less than 30 minutes. And the timingbelt cover was a clip on cover.
Because of the the easy maintnance, I drove that car 870 000km. And it was only rust that killed it.
Then I replaced the car with a used Peugeot and almost everything was harder. Parts were more expensive too.
And then I replaced that car with a VW Caravelle. This is not cool to work on because there is no extra space around the engine. Changing the glowplugs was a nightmare. Fuel lines was in the way, had to take of the front of the car to gain access and so on.

If a machine is service friendly it is actually less important for it to be reliable. I would ofcourse have both :-)
What's up with all the screws on some of the back covers btw? The old Ricoh 1060 only had 2 that I had to take out. Other newer designs on color and smaller b/w have a lot. Thinking of buying an electric screwdriver . . .

The designers should focus on making a machine where it's easy to take out modeles too. Like again in the Ricoh 1060 and newer where you can take out the complete paperfeed mechanism. It is fairly easy to take out, and a bit harder to replace. But you have 3 connectors and a plastic cover to remove first. Why don't they make it with a single plug in the end that will automatically be connected/disconnected when the part is installer/removed?. And just drop the covers. I'm sure they could make it look OK without all those plastic covers too. Or just make it a clip on cover...

I would really like to see Dyson make a redesign of a copier. That would be cool. Their design and engineering history is an example of thinking outside the box. Dyson official site
I like the way they redesigned the washing machine too a few years back.