C3525i - New Owner and Quality Issues + Maintenance Questions

[brokentavern]

I bought a used C3525i for my home business. The machine has about 70K clicks on it mostly black, and appeared in good condition having only been used for paperwork at a small clinic. 10k of those are ones I’ve put on it in the last few months. About 500 impressions ago it started having quality issues which continue to get worse, mostly just with black printing. I traded the black and magenta drum to see if it was a drum issue and it made no difference, so I think it’s a developer related issue. fading in horizontal latitude on the top 40% of the sheet. I tried to upload 2 photo here but wasn't able to so I've uploaded them to imgur: https://imgur.com/a/ho3xaHT

[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/f0HSaiG.jpeg[/IMG]
[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/sUYiay5.jpeg[/IMG]

As you can see, the color copy of a random video cover I had laying around looks pretty OK, but the black copy looks quite poor.

I worked in a digital print shop from '07-'17 and worked with Canon, Xerox, and Oce machines. I'm pretty handy with fixing mechanical and electronic stuff, so I'd love to get any tips as well from anyone who can let me know how to maintain this machine and service it on my own. Any regular maintenance I should expect to learn how to do? Any parts I should replace regularly to keep bigger issues from happening down the road? any advice is helpful. and secondly, if this is a developer related issue, is it possible to rebuild or refill them on my own? are refurbished ones worth buying? or just get a brand new genuine part?

[bobburnsreb]

Canon - imageRUNNER ADVANCE C3530i / C3525i - User's Guide

This should pull up the operators manual, look under trouble shooting > problems with printing results > white streaks appear > Cleaning the dust proof glass. Looks like your laser is not writing to the drum in the area the glass is dirty.

Good Luck!

[brokentavern]

Canon - imageRUNNER ADVANCE C3530i / C3525i - User's Guide

This should pull up the operators manual, look under trouble shooting > problems with printing results > white streaks appear > Cleaning the dust proof glass. Looks like your laser is not writing to the drum in the area the glass is dirty.

Good Luck!

Thanks for the response. This isn’t a scanner bed issue. I’ve worked with these machines long enough I’m not a total amateur and know how to trouble shoot the usual issues, but not an expert either, and this one is a bit beyond my knowledge of how to identify the issue. It does the same thing with digital prints as well, so definitely not a scanner issue. Take a look at the 2 photos I linked if you have time. One is color and has minimal issues, a second in black and white of the exact same thing has pronounced quality issues. Let me know what you think.

[bobburnsreb]

At what point did I mention anything but the engine of the machine? If you understand that the laser writes to the drum and between the laser and the drum is a slit glass, then it would make sense that that glass would have to be clean, or it will block the laser beam. You obviously don't know the basic copy process and as I stated, Good Luck.

[Radiscar]

If you open the front door of the copier, there should be a blue wand attached to the door -maybe along with picture instructions on how to clean the laser assembly. The "top of the page" is the front of copier, correct? That is because dust gets into the front and covers the laser glass slit. The holes to clean are directly under the drum/dev doors.

It's fairly easy to remove the drums/developers so you can quickly see how the developer cylinder looks if that doesn't fix the issue.