14 Oct
2015
14 Oct
'15
8:11 p.m.
On 10/14/2015 11:46 AM, tony duell wrote:
We never, ever had the pump clog. Sometimes we needed to
clean gunk out of the fountain area, but the pumps were
never a problem. The pump ran filled with the toner, and
was below toner level in the bottle. Sometimes if you
hadn't printed in a while, the first page would come out
partially blank, but then it would get going and work fine.
Not sure if the V80 worked the same way, it sounds like
maybe it was allowed to drip down and go dry when not
printing. That might have been the cause of the clogging.
Jon
[Versatec paper feed motors]
Versatec made a lot of stuff, and went through a whole bunch
of iterations. But, a stepper seems MOST logical to advance
the paper every time the line has been written. A stepper
is great to start and stop on a dime, and otherwise stay
perfectly in synch with intermittent data from the
computer. The motor drive is inside the hinged top of the
printer, but no telling if the V80 was built the same way.
Yes, absolutely, on the Versatec 1200A. I put
those motors
in a milling machine. Big, round case stepper motors, with
a ghastly resistor-transistor drive.
You've got me worried now...
I have V80. Actually, it's ICL-badged, and has a GPIB adapter board at the back
connected to the normal parallel port [1]. I was prepared to swear the motor in
that is a normal DC motor, but perhaps I have misremembered it. I really don't
want to strip it down tonight, and finding the manuals [2] Is an even bigger job.
Yes, that's like the V80, but I am pretty sure on that machine the
'fountain' is on the suction side of the pump, that is it sucks from the outer
region.
I can absolutely say the 1200A did not work that way, as you
could manually start the fountain pump with the cover open.
Now that I think about it more, I don't think you were
supposed to be able to do that, but you could push a relay
manually to do it. Without the paper there, it could
overflow if you let the pump run too long.
When there is paper present this causes toner to
flow from the
bottle up through the middle bit, then back round the outside to the pump
and back to the bottle. Again I might be mis-remembering things...
That makes some
sense, as it makes it pretty impossible to
cause a spill. But, it probably takes a lot longer to get
the fountain started that way.
How could you
do that??? Just the smell of the stuff should
have been adequate warning.
Got any better ways to unclog the pump?