Anybody seen this before? 554e with disintegrated exit unit idle rollers?

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  • femaster
    Service Manager

    1,000+ Posts
    • May 2011
    • 1470

    #1

    [Jamming] Anybody seen this before? 554e with disintegrated exit unit idle rollers?

    Just thought I'd share something with the forum to see if anybody else has seen this before.

    We were getting fairly frequent jamming calls to a 554e that has been out in the field since early 2016, and had a page count of just over 959K pages. Unfortunately it seems that the jam codes were not recorded by the technician so I don't have those available to me, but the jamming was occurring in the exit and reversal unit area when doing duplex copying. Numerous things were tried which seemed to fix the issue, at least temporarily, but the customer would ultimately call back with the same problem.

    Since we seemed to be getting nowhere with it, I sent the technician out with a low count reversal unit and exit unit from a parts machine, to and swap out and see if we could get things back up and running. Ultimately it was the exit unit that fixed the problem, and that's where my question begins.

    Upon inspecting the removed exit unit, I found that the idle rollers in the unit had deteriorated so badly that there was barely any roller left to some of them. Now, I've never seen anything like this, even on machines with well over 2.5M pages. Anybody have any thoughts? None of the other plastics in the area showed any signs of deterioration at all, no signs of a fire of any kind, it was strictly the idle rollers.

    IMG_3039.jpg IMG_3040.jpg IMG_3041.jpg IMG_3043(1).jpg IMG_3044.jpg
    A Ricoh Service Tech for 7 year. A Konica Minolta Service Tech for 7 years. Now, KM service manager for 4 years.
    My Ricoh knowledge is slowly dwindling away at this point. Many things have been lost to time...
  • Thib
    Technician
    • May 2017
    • 33

    #2
    I've seen toner buildup that causes page indentations, but never deterioration. Interesting. Anything special about the paper they are using?

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    • femaster
      Service Manager

      1,000+ Posts
      • May 2011
      • 1470

      #3
      The unit was from a low volume (relatively speaking) school machine, so I'm sure it was the cheapest junk paper money can buy. Unfortunately I don't have the details as to a brand, but should be your run of the mill 20# letter.

      If you look closely at at least one of those pictures where there is still some roller left, you can see some small toner spots stuck to what's left of the roller. Just to add, fusing temps were at factory defaults, they weren't cranked up at all.
      Last edited by femaster; 11-08-2024, 03:13 AM.
      A Ricoh Service Tech for 7 year. A Konica Minolta Service Tech for 7 years. Now, KM service manager for 4 years.
      My Ricoh knowledge is slowly dwindling away at this point. Many things have been lost to time...

      Comment

      • blackcat4866
        Master Of The Obvious

        Site Contributor
        10,000+ Posts
        • Jul 2007
        • 22960

        #4
        That effect was common on Canon's from the 90's. The call was usually for jamming, but the machine only jammed once large chunks of the roller fell off and obstructed the paper path. Thanks for that little memory! =^..^=
        If you'd like a serious answer to your request:
        1) demonstrate that you've read the manual
        2) demonstrate that you made some attempt to fix it.
        3) if you're going to ask about jams include the jam code.
        4) if you're going to ask about an error code include the error code.
        5) You are the person onsite. Only you can make observations.

        blackcat: Master Of The Obvious =^..^=

        Comment

        • AlaskaCopyTech
          Technician

          50+ Posts
          • Jan 2024
          • 69

          #5
          I have long speculated that cleaning the rubber rollers with alcohol and result in increased drying and aging of certain rollers. This could be a case of a tech or client cleaning these rollers with alcohol a bunch.

          Comment

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