A sign of the times. (Laserjet 4000s here)

On 26 Jan 2008, at 01:53, Chuck Guzis wrote: *sigh* I have a similar conundrum here. My father & I have about half-a-dozen Laserjet 4000s which fail to pick the paper properly. The problem can easily be isolated to the rubber "pick up" roller at the front of the tray - measured with a micrometer a good one is a hair's breadth larger in diameter than one that is worn. These are / were fantastic printers - I think the 4-series had a monthly duty-cycle of 65,000 pages, so I assume these are similar in specification. The HP engineers intended for this part to be easily replaceable, and you can easily pick up a roller set on eBay. Unfortunately the price comes to about ?12 per tray - or perhaps ?25 shipped for rubbers for both lower trays plus the manual feed pickup, too - and these printers have a resale value of only ?35. I think it's tragic to be throwing out such decent & solidly- constructed printers in favour of cheap plastic rubbish - in the event a repair is necessary the kind of printers we can get for less money will complain about disassembly with the "pling" of flying broken-plastic sproggets - but it makes little economic sense to do otherwise. I've been meaning the last week to try & find a source of Laserjet rollers where I can purchase 10 or 20 at more sensible rates, but I'm not overflowing with optimism. I'm inclined to think that in a few years time our current consumerist practices of throwing away hardware rather than repairing it will begin once again to look foolish, but in the meantime what's one to do? Stroller.