Fedron is great. I have been using it for years. You can find it at a copier
repair place. It works wonders with feed rollers but will dissolve some
plastics so you want to be careful.
Copier places buy it by the gallon. I just take a small bottle to them and
buy like 1/2 a pint. You want a glass bottle with a good seal, it is highly
volatile.
A little goes a long way. I use a cotton cloth, dip a corner in the bottle
and apply sparingly. Rotate the roller against the cloth. It works on inkjet
feed rollers along with laser printer feed rollers. It has been a long time
but I think I even used it on typewriter platen rollers, first cleaning them
with alcohol to strip the ink. I usually do it outside, I don't like solvents
in the house.
Fedron works very well. I have no idea who makes it.
Paxton
Portland, OR
On Dec 22, 0:03, Neil Cherry wrote:
> Mike Ford wrote:
> >
> > Any opinions on "rubber rejuvinent"? I want to give all my printers a
once
> > over during the holidays, and I've heard this stuff is just the ticket
for
> > lazy pickup rollers etc. Web searchs have shown a couple different
aerosol
> > products, but I think it also comes in bottles. Tomorrow I do some
local
> > hunting at a couple big electronics parts stores. Anybody have
experience,
> > or preferences?
>
> If you find something that works let me know my 550C has the same
problem.
In the printing industry, Methyl Ethyl Ketone (MEK) is used to deep-clean
ink rollers and "blankets" on offset litho machines. It's a powerful ink
solvent, and also causes rubber to swell very slightly, so it removes the
glaze you sometimes get, and lifts the dents you get in the blanket as a
result of a paper smash[1]. MEK works well on pickup rollers, and it
doesn't harm the ozone layer. However, like many solvents, it does
dissolve some common plastics (polystyrene, ABS, PVC, etc) and paint; it
also leaches the oils and fats from your skin, so don't wash in it :-) Not
for too long, anyway. It's also flammable. However, it's much safer than
benzene, xylol, etc. It's a relative of acetone (nail varnish remover) and
you can get it from print suppliers (they may call it something like
blanket rejuvenator, and charge extra), lab suppliers, etc. Put some on a
cloth and wipe the roller with it. I've used it on lots of printer
rollers, and the carriages of daisywheel and dotmatrix printers.
You don't really want to use anything that is a good solvent for rubber or
rubber cement as that will end up distorting the roller or making it gummy
and ultimately leave you worse off.
[1] In an offset litho press, the image is transferred from an image
"plate" -- a very thin sheet of metal or plastic wrapped round a large drum
-- to a rubber "blanket", also wrapped round a large drum. From there, the
image is transferred to the paper. If a sheet of paper gets crumpled in
the press, it makes dents in the blanket, which then fails to pick up ink
>from the plate in the low spots. This is called a "paper smash" or a
"blanket smash".
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
In a message dated 12/21/2000 6:54:03 PM Pacific Standard Time,
rigdonj(a)intellistar.net writes:
> I have to take a look at the CPU on this one but I'm pretty sure that
> these don't use the DEC CPU. The model that uses the DEC CPU is a Tek 8560
> or somrthing like that. I have one of them too but It's not here so I can't
> check the model number.
>
Joe is right. It is the 85XXs that used the DEC cards. I have had several of
both. The 8540, 8550 & 8560 were Tektronix Microcomputer Development Labs.
The 8540 hosted emulator/debugers and interfaced to VAX 780s. The 8560s were
more stand alone and had an 11/23 processor. The 8561 was the Software
Developing Unit and worked in combination with the integration emulator 85XX
unit and a logic analyzer.
To quote the 1984 Tek catalog, the 8561 had an 11/23 processor, 256K of Ram,
13.5 MB of HD, 1 Meg floppy (8"), 2 user ports and 2 printer ports. It could
be upgraded to 8 users, 35.6 Meg of HD and 1 Meg of ram. It ran TNIX.
The 8002 that Joe has is earlier and had been discontinued by '84.
When Tek had their big Ross Dove auction here I got a truckload of this
stuff. Includes were several 8002s and their associated Dual 8" floppy disk
drive units, 8003s? The cards in these reminded me of overgrown S100 cards
but they were tek's own. Stupidly I let my partner scrap them, not realizing
it is the first units that are the ones to save. These date to the late
1970s. It reminded me of a 12 slot? S100 buss machine. The cards were about
the same width but taller than S100 cards. I think the architecture was
different but I never investigated.
I am sorry, Joe, but I don't think I have anything left of that vintage, but
I sure remember them.
Paxton
Portland, OR
Mike Ford <mikeford(a)socal.rr.com> wrote:
> Any opinions on "rubber rejuvinent"? I want to give all my printers a once
> over during the holidays, and I've heard this stuff is just the ticket for
> lazy pickup rollers etc. Web searchs have shown a couple different aerosol
> products, but I think it also comes in bottles. Tomorrow I do some local
> hunting at a couple big electronics parts stores. Anybody have experience,
> or preferences?
Back in the 1980s the HP CEs used to carry a bottle of something
called Fedron that was very aromatic and good at making rubber
printer rollers just grabby enough to pull paper through.
It was so good I figure it caused the hole in the ozone layer
and that's why you can't find it any more.
Lately I've turned up (at Fry's, surprisingly enough) a 100ml bottle
of something differently aromatic called Rubber Renue. It's from
M. G. Chemicals <URL:http://www.mgchemicals.com> and is their catalog
number 408A-100ml. It seems to have made the rubber pads on the
supply reel fingers in one of my HP 88780 drives a bit more grabby
than they were, which was desired. I haven't tried it on printers
yet.
Fair warning, wherever you use this stuff will be pungent for a couple
of days if the ventilation isn't good. It doesn't smell bad to me but
your tastes may differ, and it's an eye/skin/lung irritant as well as
flammable. Chemical contents are claimed to be dimethylbenzene
(CAS#1330-20-7) and methyl salicylate (CAS#119-36-8).
-Frank McConnell
On December 21, healyzh(a)aracnet.com wrote:
> I believe there is a brand called something like "Rubber Renews It", our ex
> printer/plotter guy absolutly swore by the stuff. Unfortunatly he retired
> last week after about 21 years of doing the job, it was *scarry* how much he
> knew about printers!
I think it's "Rubber ReNu"...I saw that stuff work once, years
ago...it was amazing. Haven't been able to find it, though.
If anyone comes across a supplier, please let me know...I'd love to
add a bottle of that stuff to my bag of tricks.
-Dave McGuire
Sorry for the spam... I'm setting up a new firewall, and I'm having
trouble convincing sendmail.cf to do what I want.... Cross your
fingers...
clint
PS You'll only see this if it works, not the many trys that didn't
work :)
On December 19, Ernest wrote:
> I have a very low opinion of bid snipers. They're like the proverbial "bad
> apples" that spoil it for everyone. I believe that most new bidders on ebay
> go into it with honest intentions but they (like me) learn quickly that a
> last second bid sniper will likely ruin the joy for them. Bid sniping is a
...
I think you're missing the point...the notion of "it's not whether
you win or lose, it's how you play the game" is something that parents
say to their children to stop them from crying when they lose. It has
nothing to do with eBay.
For buyers, eBay is a venue for getting things that they want. For
sellers, it's a venue for getting rid of things they don't want. It's
not there for "enjoyment" or "fun" or anything of the sort. If
there's something on eBay that you want, the effort (and money) that
you expend to get it is determined by how badly you want the item.
It's really as simple as that.
Ernest, as a frequent sniper, I sincerely apologize to you on behalf
of other snipers for ruining your experiences. But please try to see
it from the other side...it's a means to an end, it's nothing
personal.
-Dave McGuire
On December 21, Tony Duell wrote:
> > Does anyone have one of these or is anyone familar with them? I just
>
> I have something similar.
>
> The box with the floppy drive(s) (or maybe a Micropolis 1200 hard disk in
> place of one of the floppies) is essentially a PDP11. There's a real DEC
> CPU card (normally an PDP11/03, sometimes an 11/23) CPU card in there,
> along with special Tektronix cards containing RAM, boot ROMs, disk
> controller, serial ports, etc. The backplane has one normal DEC Q-bus
> slot for the CPU and some Tektronix slots for the other cards.
What?? REALLY? Damn, I passed up one at a hamfest this past
summer. I really regret it now. That sounds like a really neat
system. I had no idea Tek embedded DEC processors in their
development systems.
-Dave McGuire
I'm trying to put together some pages on the VAX and have put them up under
my computers section
<http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/computers>. One of the pages is a pricing
guide for VAXen :-) Now that should start an interesting discussion :-)
--Chuck
Does anyone have one of these or is anyone familar with them? I just
picked one up last week. I dug through my odds and ends and found a couple
of manuals for it and several boxs of TekDOS operating system disks with
the Z-80 assembler and software. I scanned a picture of the system from
one of the manuals at
"http://www.intellistar.net/~rigdonj/tek/tek8002.jpg". The two pieces that
I have are shown at the top right.
Joe
