T1100 vacillating line

[tmw]

I might not have to worry about fixing this ultimately, but it would be nice to know for future reference. Black is mainly used for printing plans. All the way down, every 3/4 inch the print deviates the thickness of a line. On service prints which are bordered by a blue line, the cyan is out of register the same way. Oddly enough, the demo prints look perfectly fine. I cleaned the encoder strip a couple of times, ran the printhead alignment 2 or 3 times, and the paper advance calibration. All the colors except for pk are printing solid. I ran several cleanings on it, but it wouldn't clear up. My guess is that it might not be able to read the alignment pattern properly even though it says it's ok. The customer ordered a pk-g printhead & will let us know how it turns out. I was wondering if it was more or less of a board or cable problem. If so, it may not be worth fixing ?

[Kiran Otter]

If it's vertical lines that are disjointed (perpendicular to the carriage travel) then you've either got a bad belt, a damaged encoder strip, a bad encoder sensor or a bad carriage motor, though the last two are unlikely. If the encoder is bad the printer would throw 86:01 errors all the time. My money would be on the encoder strip or belt. Or both.

The demo prints are usually printed in best quality so they print uni-directionally which would hide registration issues seen when printing bi-directionally.

Kiran

[tmw]

Thanks for your reply. I forgot to mention I set it on the 'best' setting. I think they are on the tipping point of getting another plotter, but it's nice to know what I might look for in the future.