Paper Quality and Affect on Machine

[glunnen]

Can basic quality copy paper damage the drum or adversely affect any other vital parts of a copy machine over time?

[FRIDGEMAGNET]

Can basic quality copy paper damage the drum or adversely affect any other vital parts of a copy machine over time?

Sounds like a loaded question, why do you ask?

[blackcat4866]

The coating from a gloss paper can coat the pickup tires registration rollers, and even collect on the cleaning blade. The same goes for NCR coated paper.

With particularly abrasive paper stocks you can get premature wear on the pickup rollers, drum, and fuser rollers.

When labels are cut too deeply the adhesive in the middle layer can squeeze out between the labels and leave adhesive on the registration rollers, drum, cleaning blade, & fuser rollers. The adhesive is not as obvious as the toner stuck in the adhesive. It usually looks like millions of tiny specks, at first appearing random, but there is a pattern if you look hard enough for it (on ledger size prints).

Do you have a particular paper stock that you suspect? =^..^=

[FRIDGEMAGNET]

"Basic quality paper" tends to have a much higher dust content that clogs up feed rollers causing jams. The dust can also cause problems with other areas and require more regular cleaning.
This paper tends to be more opaque and less white which will show up as poorer quality.
It can also be more susceptible to damp - the plague of copier engineers!

[glunnen]

Thanks for the quick replies. The reason I posed the question is that it was suggested to us by our copier service tech (who also supplies our paper) that our company purchase something better than basic quality copy paper because it may be contributing to premature wear on the drum. That said, our service contract covers drum replacement so I am wondering if there is any benefit to higher grade paper apart from aesthetics.

[blackcat4866]

The machine will stay cleaner. It will definitely jam less. And the copies will look aesthetically more pleasing.

To friends, I suggest running 24 lb bond. In my mind its well worth the little bit of extra cost.

As you may have gathered from my post, only in extreme cases can media actually cause harm or excessive wear to the machine. =^..^=

[banginbishop]

Alarm bells start ringing when techs start mentioning paper - why? Because unfortunately some "techs" blame the paper for jamming when they can't diagnose the fault correctly.

Yes there are times to blame paper but how many times have you been to a customers and been told "the other engineer said it was our paper" so we changed the paper but its still jamming

You can't tell the customer the previous engineer was talking out of his a**e and when the customer does have a real problem with the paper, it’s even harder to convince them they do have a problem.

We shoot ourselves in the foot because a lot of the time basic procedures or laziness happens. For instance faint or patchy copies - "its damp paper" when in truth its probably the dev or the drum unit going over its pm life but again some "techs" just don’t check/reset dev counters or don’t understand the basics of a copier like checking the transfere.

How many engineers have done a basic course on how a copier works e.g. from scanners, drums, developer, feed and pulley systems?

Sorry for my little rant and i'm not having a go at you fridgemagnet for damp paper

[fixthecopier]

I have always told my customers about the differences in paper, and also told them that in only rare cases is the paper causing the problems. However, here in North Carolina in the summer , the humidity is very bad. This compounded with the fact that the army uses cheap { quality, not price }, recycled paper has given me several opportunities to demo first hand how the paper can jam up the machine. Stored improperly, the paper picks up lots of water out of the air, causing a large amount of curl on the lead edge corners when it hits the hot fuser, which then get caught and jammed when they hit tight spots. I have been able to show the customer how the machine would jam every page at the fuser and then without doing anything else except putting dry paper in , that I had brought with me, the machine would run with no problem. I would then remove the dry paper and put his paper back in and it would jam every page. Remove the wet paper and put the dry back in and it would run without a jam. Even with this cut and dry demo on how the paper was the problem, and not the machine that was in like new condition, they still called in the following month, right on cue to complain that the machine was jamming again.
It is not unusual for me to find different weights of paper in the same tray, and on occasion different sizes of paper mixed in the same tray.
So sometimes the paper can be the immedite problem, but your tech is correct in that using the cheap stuff can cause poor performance down the road.

[prntrfxr]

I agree with banginbishop (that name is kind of scary by the way), that there are techs out there who claim its a paper problem when they cant fix the problem. However, in Georgia we have high humidity and it becomes a definite problem. Most of the times its customers leaving the paper out of the wrapper all weekend. I used to have more service calls the first 3 days of the week and I blamed paper as a problem. More calls after it rains. And i cant argue against it when I remove the paper present in the tray, put in fresh paper and the problem goes away. Put the prior paper back and the jam comes back. In some cases I've seen smoke/steam come out of the fuser cause the paper was so damp. As regards poor quality paper i havent seen too much of that, unless it appeared really thin. Occasionally seen problems with paper too thick or jams with customer printing on the wrong kind of envelopes, etc...