BizHub PRO C6500 fusing belt damaged before 400K copies

[drodas78]

Hi. Attached are the print copies and the pictures of the damaged areas in the fusing belt you can see the printer results between the red lines in the JPG file. The machine has 180K counter total and the fusing belt was supposed to be changed until 400K. Any idea of what is the reason of this? Is this a common problem?

Regards,

Daniel Rodas.

[Herrmann]

No common Problem, most of the Fuser Belts here reaches 600k and more. I will ask some colleaques and tell you, if there are some rumors

[Stirton.M]

Man, that first zipped image is ugly.

My immediate guess would be that there is something that is inside the belt area, riding on the sponge (lower) roller. I would take apart the unit to replace the belt, which is an obvious thing, and likely during that process, you will find out what it is that is causing that. Generally, this problem is certainly not common. I service locally about 15 different locations and have never seen anything like that. Worse I have seen is paper edge wear marks and some kind of gummy oily buildup.

Hard to say for sure, but I suspect you will need to replace one or both of the rollers for the belt section. Not a big deal, these are PM items, so they would have had to been replaced eventually anyway.

[drodas78]

Tnx for the quick replies. I live in Guatemala and there's no stock in my country. I ordered overnight shipping from Los Angeles but I only bought the fusing belt, It will gonna take 7 days to be in my city. Dear Stirton can you advice what other parts number do I have to order? I don't want to put new fusing belt if older parts can destroy it. Can you give me some online store address to buy the Multemp grease FF-RM part number 00GR00260. For the fusing belt replacing procedure?

Regards.

[kmcopier]

I have seen this more, this happens what I noticed if customer doesn't make the wright settings with thick paper.......

[drodas78]

Could you explain further about don't setting right with thick paper? Thank you.

[kmcopier]

thick paper

Could you explain further about don't setting right with thick paper? Thank you.

We have seen this if customer prints on 300 grams full duplex and the settings are set for 256 grams so that is possible for automatic duplex print so the customer cheats the machine

[sbillis]

also customers are "forgeting" to choose the right grams and the 300gr paper goes with the speed of 100gr !

speed of light ! for faster production ...

[Herrmann]

Worse I have seen is paper edge wear marks and some kind of gummy oily buildup.

Same here, i would like to discuss about this problem, should we open a new thread to this, or discuss this here further?

[Stirton.M]

Tnx for the quick replies. I live in Guatemala and there's no stock in my country. I ordered overnight shipping from Los Angeles but I only bought the fusing belt, It will gonna take 7 days to be in my city. Dear Stirton can you advice what other parts number do I have to order? I don't want to put new fusing belt if older parts can destroy it. Can you give me some online store address to buy the Multemp grease FF-RM part number 00GR00260. For the fusing belt replacing procedure?

Regards.

See attached zip for a section of the parts manual regarding the fuser assembly.

Also, see the image below regarding the section of the fuser you are looking at, regarding the belt.

Two items, the upper roller and lower roller, items 7 and 8 in the image, are of particular interest. Once the belt has been removed, you can see what has happened to these rollers. One or both "might" be damaged. The only way to be certain is to remove the belt and look. Since the machine is technically down for the count, this is the time to do that inspection.

As for replacing the belt, you never did a fuser rebuild yet? I will describe the unit as seen when it is in the machine, regarding left, right, front and rear. Remove the rear plastic cover, and remove the top metal cover that is over the belt unit.

Remove the motor transmission (4 screws) on front side. There is a fuser pressure sensor (page 1, part 25) that needs to be unscrewed from its mount on the left side of this unit. Page 5 image, part 36 holds it all to the main body. Be sure to disconnect the harness assembly on the lower right side.

Most of this next part involves page 12 image.

Remove the heat lamp assembly for the upper roller section. It can most easily be removed from the front, via part 11. Be careful with this part, it is very fragile. From here, you should be able to see two LARGE shoulder screws that "close" the upper and lower sections. Unfortunately, there is no part number identifier for these screws. Look at image 7, part 24. This item is nearest the screw I am talking of. There is another one similar to this one on the rear side. The removal of these will allow you to swing the sections open on a hinge.

Once the two pieces are separated this way, you have access to the lower roller as well. Though I doubt you need to work on this, it is a PM item.

The upper section, remove the pressure springs, part 20. Note the longer hook side on one end of the springs. These are so you can easily grasp them with a pair of needle nose pliers or hemostats for removal and installation.

Remove part 29. This item holds the front bearing in.

Remove the snap rings (parts "i"). Not sure why those have no formal part number. But anyway, you need to remove the snap rings on the upper roller, front and rear, to allow access to the bearings, part 15. Remove them along with the sleeve, part 14.

Once the bearings are removed, you can start to remove the belt rollers together. You will need to slide the spongy lower roller towards the front to free the rear side bearing, part 19. Then gently pull up on the rear side while gently pressing part 33 out of the way of the lower bearing, and the whole belt portion is now free of the unit.

The lower roller is removed first. Then the belt can slip over the front and rear guides, part 6.

I highly, emphatically, recommend you leave on the foam sheet around the belt until you have almost fully assembled everything. This is to ensure you do not damage the belt surface. Same thing for the lower roller as well if you replace that. Also, take note that the belt surface is NOT uniform right across. There is a small "wear" mark on the belt, about 15-20mm thick. This mark mates up with the thermal fuse (part 27) on the rear section of the upper unit.

There is also a part I should caution. A gear, part 12, page 9. This bearing has a small recess that should go towards the C-clip on the shaft. If it is reversed, this WILL write off the gear and possibly take a few others along with it.

Reassembly is the reverse of all that.

As for the grease....you should be able to find equivalent lithium grease locally, I am assuming of course. Automotive stores carry this. Look for anything that has about 300C max.

[Stirton.M]

Same here, i would like to discuss about this problem, should we open a new thread to this, or discuss this here further?

The gummy oil I suspect might be from the lower roller inside the belt section. The only fix to this I am aware of is to simply clean it when I see it. Running a clean sheet of paper through the unit manually a few times seems to help clean this up, I reverse the motor to get the pressure roller up tightly and then roll it forward with paper in the path.

As for the paper marks, this is a tough one. It is caused by smaller sized card stock. Easy from a tech point of view, hard from a customer point of view. Generally, when faced with this issue, most customers can work around it. So long as they do not do anything with solids where the marking occurs, this isn't much an issue. However, that said...

Some customers do not want this. Instead, we offer them a second fuser unit. Of course, they must absorb the costs. There is a fuser swap kit available for the customer to swap out the fusing unit without much effort, between the different types of jobs. I have a customer who do want this. The kit has been ordered and now it is a matter of time before the unit and kit is sent to us for final setup.

The only issue I have with this is that I doubt the customer will "remember" to swap the unit when they do certain small size thick stock.

[drodas78]

Thank you very much! I will tell you what happen when I change the belt.

[laserman06]

I have seen this more, this happens what I noticed if customer doesn't make the wright settings with thick paper.......

This is exactly right. I have a c6500 that is in a print shop. I have to replace the belt about every 150K. He uses large and thick stock. It only counts 1 click per large paper for total counter and 2 clicks for parts counter. Sucks for me, great for him.

[dljorg]

C6500 Fuser Belt Damage

Hello in Guatemala -
Definitely have seen this symptom before but only on belts with much higher time. The surface of the belt has delaminated. This is a very rare happening.

Believe the cause is a combination of running the machine with incorrect paper type and weight settings and worn rollers although the wear should not happen at 180K. Incorrect paper weights (as very correctly noted by my esteemed colleagues below) are used by customers to make the machine run faster or to automatically duplex stuff they should not. This will cause a multitude of performance problems - usually jamming and images that are fragile and crack off the page.

Every time this has happened in my field of 500+ machines (6 occurrances that I know of) doing the recommended maintence for 400K made the problem go away. The comments from our Canadian friend are excellent in this regard.

Recommend a stern talk with the customer about how his practices are causing the problem. Should not be too hard a sell if you are 7 days away from the parts to fix it. In our market most customers go crazy if they have to wait 3 hours.

Best Regards from the snow in Connecticut USA

[drodas78]

Got the fusing belt but is damaged

Thanks to all the people who have followed this thread.

Finally I got the brand new fusing belt. I purchased it from the online store of ARC Services Co. - Konica Minolta Copiers, Parts, and Supplies, Imaging Units, Toner but I feel very bad because when I installed the fusing belt in the upper roller and move the protection sheet to the right It has one damage beneath the film in the orange part of the fusing belt. You can see the attached picture.

I want to know if you think that I can use this fusing belt because I contacted support at arcservicesco.com and some one say that maybe they can give me warranty if I send the same pictures posted here. I Called again later and some one else told me that the part was original and came directly from Konica Minolta and if the box was open they wouldn't give refund. I don't know what to do because the part is expensive $421.00 plus shipping and taxes to my country. Also the people of arcservices.com told me that they don't have more fusing belts in stock and I have to wait until next friday 8th - Jan - 2010. So I'm very worried . If I wasn't open the box it would be impossible to see that the belt came damaged. Any one knows about the policies for warranty from Konica Minolta? Do you think that I can use this belt with good printing results?

Please advice.

Regards.