It's a cheaper model Brother. It is a simple, solid printer but now it's not grabbing the paper.

I am thinking of how to re-purpose this printer. What else can be done with an old laser printer? I may cannibalize it for electronic parts but not sure.

Is it fixable or should I re-purpose?

The first think that occured to me is, Perhaps it needs a nice cleaning. If the rollers that grab the paper are slick dirty (to borrow a phrase from my mother), it may just be a matter of cleaning or replacing them.

A web search turns up a number of links, including tutorials on YouTube (I did not narrow the search to Brother Printers).

No idea about Brother printers but HP ones usually have a maintenance kit you can buy, it includes all feed rollers (clip out the old ones and click on the new ones), the fusing assembly and probably a carbon impregnated foam transfer roller, plastic gloves and pictorial instructions. Looks like Brother do something similar, check out maintenance kits here.

I managed to bring an old Laserjet 5L back to life this way after finding it at the local dump. (We're talking a few years ago now!!)

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I had to get a replacement printer but the ideas posted are good. Maybe I can clean it or get a maintenance kit. But I was looking at resale value and it's almost worthless due to the cost of shipping it and because there are so many used printers out there.


So I am back to re-purposing ideas. Eventually it will probably be donated. Unless it has high voltage transformer or some other neat things in it of course.

If you can clean it up and get it working, donate it to a local charity thrift store. If you can't get it working, a local marker space my be interested in it.

If you end up having to dispose of it, check for proper electronics disposal/recycling procedures/sites in your area.

Nope! I doubt it. Most equipment like this run off 12 volts (motors, solenoids, etc) with 5 volts for the electronics or thereabouts, the transformers are purpose built for the equipment, logic boards have customised ASICs to operate the thing so I'd say there's very little that can be re-purposed. Specialist recycling companies can use the plastics and reclaim some of the gold used in the circuit boards and components. The gold on circuit board connectors and chip leads is in the order of 5 microns thick so no get-rich-quick deal.

Drop it off at your local recycling centre and they'll sort out any reclamation.

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And what would they do with it?

Hmm, the transfer-roller may be charged with something fairly high-voltage as may the detack wire, if it has one.
The fuser will tend, I think, to be more high current than high voltage due to the need to produce heat.

Yeah a laser printer is an interesting device. I have been looking into it. The fuser has to heat up quickly so not sure what's there to do that. There's also a laser but I don't know what variety. And the electrodes for static charging. Obviously there's at least one motor.

The fuser may only have one hot roller with heating elements in it -- temperatures being up to about 250C if memory serves me correctly. The laser will have to be fairly powerful as the drums tend not to be overly sensitive or they'd have problems with any slight light leakage into the mechanism. The devices will have a high voltage (HVPS) and low voltage (LVPS) PSU. Lots of the rollers are run form the same motor but I think at least two is probably going to be required on anything other than the smallest of devices.
Sadly the technical manuals for them seem to be harder to get hold of then they ought to be even from within the manufacturers themselves.

The old HP stuff I used to work on; Laserjet 2,3,4 and 5s used a fuser assembly with a teflon coated tube containing a halogen strip lamp. The 5L used a ceramic heater inside a foil cylinder. the foil eventually worked its way to one end where in invariably shredded itself leaving black toner marks down the other edge of the paper.

I also worked on Infoprint IBM 3900 and 400 high speed laser printers (the latter with a five beam blue laser) which had, in the first case a rubber cover hot roll, second case a silicon rubber covered hot roll, both of which had four, meter long halogen bulbs through them, each with a different length of filament to allow different widths of paper to be fused. They use roll paper about a metre in diameter. The hot rolls (fuser rollers) had to be coated by special fuser oil to prevent the roll paper sticking to them and causing a paper crash when running. These printers were used for bill printing and connected in tandem (duplex) to print both the front and back of the bills at the same time.

Most of the Desktop HP lasers were something in the region of 0.25mW if I remember correctly. Manuals should still be available, see the HP4000/4050 one here. Check out the parts at the end of the manual, not much you could re-purpose.

OK, so things have moved on since 1999, but current manuals/pdfs should still be available I'd reckon.

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Cool, thanks for that Soadyheid. Some of my customers have those devices but, sadly, they're only of intellectual interest for me. Weirdly my employer doesn't see fit to provide access to the devices I do support. I always fancied being a field engineer but never made it.

That was in the good old days. Nowadays the HPs have a heating element and a film sleeve.

Yup! As I mention above...such technology was just coming in as I gave up servicing stuff. The shredded foil was quite a common fault needing the replacement of the whole fusing unit. Have they resolved that?

We'd replace the halogen bulb fusers when worn as well, different faults; dings, ghost images, etc, but would refurbish them ourselves back in the workshop.
Best fault we had with them was crinkled prints. The customer was using refilled toner carts which sometimes leaked toner dust onto the fuser exit throat where there would be just enough heat to melt it into a raised bump which would force the paper over to one side causing the crinkle.

These were the days!

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