Which copier was the biggest piece of crap ever?

[mascan42]

Not sure if anyone remembers the Xerox 5028. When it first came out, the pin in the doc feeder hinges would work its way loose and bust through the top cover of the feeder. The original power supply would over heat to the point that pieces would start melting. And whose brilliant idea was it to have a rubber-coated upper fuser roll?

[lvangsnes]

Does anyone remember the Facit 2350? Man, that was some hunkajunk. Monocomponent, cold fuser, moving platen, all driven #35 bicycle chain.
You legacy Minolta techs might remember the EP 4230...The Di151 is a close second. Ok, now I'm really dating myself. I worked on a liquid toner machine that hung on the wall. It was call an Eskofot. You know what? It wasn't a bad machine. It used treated cut sheets. The original fed into an exposure guide that exposed the copy during the same pass, after which it passed through the toner tank, then to the squeegee rolls.

[Zoren]

gee, i had to read the whole post to be sure but........

anyone, does mita dc-412re and mita dc-142re ring-a-bell.....

i think 412re is worst than 513z... 412re is the mother of all multiple jamming in mita 3 digit series. very bad drive clutches... while 142re is worst ever clamshell designed. skewed copy coz of poorly designed clamshell hinge. and the scanner drive is even your worst nightmare...

[copymon]

Biggest piece of crap award must go to the Minolta EP 570, ah yes, the glorious 1980s!!!

[kentala]

Ricoh MPC1500.Heap of shit.

[Klydon]

Can't hold this to 1 machine, so here is my laundry list of crappy machines I have had to deal with. Most are old dogs from back in the day. I saw some people list stuff like Ricoh 5570. The 5570 was a terrific machine for its time and I had a pile of them to work on. Far better than any listed below.

Savin 840. Saw someone post about this sucker too. Waste of effort, time, material and money. Looked like a copier kit you would buy and put together.

Any Savin short drum liquid machine running the Landa process in a low volume situation. Clean tank and remove pudding once a month.

Ricoh Ripro and Ripro Jr. Machines that move the exposure glass to make a copy should be smashed on the spot. Clamshell to boot.

Ricoh 5560. Take a not very good series of machines to start with and then speed it up. The entire machine had issues from paper feed, to developement, to cleaning, etc.

Savin 7035 (and Ricoh equivalent). Has to be one of the dirtiest running machines ever made.

Ricoh 4000 series. Put a power supply under the transfer section where it is hard to get to and then have development units leak all over them. Good fun.

Ricoh 3320. Flimsy frame caused the devo unit not to be level with resulting copy quality issues. We used to stick "hockey pucks" under the back of the machine so it was "level". Ran like a pig and oh yeah, the fuser unit was known to catch on fire occasionally. Saw several melt jobs on this one.

Aficio 400/500. At least the scanner motor was easy to replace when it wore out from too much heat because it sat above the fusing unit. Analog box converted to digital that was not around for very long thankfully.

Canon GP200/IR210. Another digital with a lot of analog elements. Fragile paper feed unit and really fussy fixing unit make this machine a utter joy to work on. Hope you don't have to have one duplex much. The available accessories were not exactly top shelf either. A sorter for a digital machine? Some rocket scientist probably got promoted for that idea.

IR330/400 with the B1 handler. Machine was not bad, but the handler is total junk. Most we had got swapped out with the A1, which had its own issues, but worked better than a B1 ever thought about.

[copytech22]

Well this one is getting pretty high on my list: 9040/9050 MP4000/5000
That Fuc*ing toner.... Geessshhhhh MAN. Come up with a better system-or do not recycle it

[mtech]

ALL,
I think that sums it up nicely.

[copytechman]

Arrrgh!!! Not the 4230-4233 series!!! Auugh!!! Nevermind the EP470Z!! Yikes! And the gloriously dirty running Aficio 350's and 450's!! Alas poor Lanier 5710 (Af6110) I knew you well!!! And just for kicks lets add an Aficio 2003 for FLAVOUR!!!

Regards!
A.

[Shadow1]

Well this one is getting pretty high on my list: 9040/9050 MP4000/5000
That Fuc*ing toner.... Geessshhhhh MAN. Come up with a better system-or do not recycle it

I'm at Ricoh University training on this series this week - we've only been screaming about the toner for a few years now. I'll let you know if there are any solutions on the horizon...

[Morlock49]

The Worst "copier" I ever worked on was a Bell and Howell micro fiche reader printer. To clean the fuser Unit you had to clamp it in a vice and scrub it with a large extra hard steel wire brush.

but to add other machines

Sharp: sf 720 exposure string kept breaking
sf 740 master clamp breaking, 1/2 moon feed roller coming unclamped
sf 825,900,901- cause they were crap
sf 755,756, 760 dev unit crap and seizing up
sf 7750 double clam shell
sf 7850 that rotating letter/a4 tray
ar 350 duplex unit kept breaking

Minolta
was it the ep-3150 that had to have the color dev unit set up through the top of optics system

[youngblood]

you'll probably agree with me....

in my opinion, the kyocera km-c850d was the biggest pile of junk that has ever been introduced to the copying industry. a whopping 8 pages a min color!! there is probably some chinese engineer sitting back, laughing his head off at us silly americans... they had soo many issues with clutches and d.v.'s and conveying parts etc... it wasn't even close to fun. i worked on one from 5:00 pm to 2:30 am once.... i ended up selling them something new.

[OJ the Bodge]

distance past

In the distance past Canon brought out a Duel componet I think it was the 1812.
What a pile of crap that was, had a TD sheet that had to be done up with 7mm socket,in the right order, no normal philips screws in it, until the engineer left cause you replaced them with proper screws.
Was only in the field for a couple of years as they were all pulled asap.

[CDVMike]

Minolta 4230/4300/5400 These machines were money makers unless they were under contract.

Canon PC 25 actually it was kinda fun working on this one quite a challenge at times I take it back I liked the early Canon PC series like the PC 7 that you had to dismantle to clean the optics in the middle (unless you broke the slit glass which I would never do! )

[mascan42]

Of the machines I currently work on, I'd have to say the KM Bizhub 420/500 is garbage. They took a perfectly good 7145 toner hopper and "improved" it until it's the #1 cause of service calls on that model. If you have to come out with nine tech bulletins on the same problem and make six or seven modifications to make sure the customer can install the toner properly, you fucked up the original design. At least the newer 421/501 seems to do better in that respect.