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Labour day (public holiday)
A little misty but warm (13°C) in the morning. A little misty and cool (16°C) at noon. A little misty and cool (12°C in the evening. Looking straight up there is blue sky and only a few clouds but down towards the horizon there is only greyness.
Labour day. So nobody works. Logical.:-)
I took the HP Deskjet apart. As I mentioned on Easter Sunday it stopped picking up paper automatically. Manually pushing a wheel inside the printer would make it accept and print. I expect it is time to get a new printer. Well, even if it had not stopped working I would be looking out for a new, colour printing one. Mainly to get the ocasional photo printed, most printing I do is black and white (that is why I always run out of white ink).
I decide to open up the old DeskJet to find out what is actually wrong. There is nothing to lose if I break it completely and there is a (slim) chance of actually fixing it.
So. I pick it up. Easier said than done with the cables inaccessible and sneaked behind the rack. Once I get it on the attic I start looking for screws but find none. The whole box is held together with plastic tabs and notches. In all of the printer I fins only tree screws, one holding the control panel in place and two others holding down the paper guide. All the rest is fit and fastened like a gun so it can be opened and totally dismantled without tools. Inside I find nothing broken but I notice that some of the gears are strangely asymmetric with some cogs, cranks and pegs transferring the rotational motion of the paper rollers into a linear motion for the paper pickup and the paper eject mechanism. The asymmetry and the strategically missing gear teeth work together to engage some gears only when the print head is in a certain position for feeding or (another position) for ejecting paper. A wonderful piece of engineering really. Of course opening up the box spilled all the gears out and I have a hell of a job getting them back in. In the correct position, before opening I could only see 7 gear wheels, after opening there are 15 wheels on a heap.
After a few hours I succeed in reassembling the thing and I even get it working again. It even picks up the paper again so in a sense I repaired it. Only, I broke one tab and now the paper eject doesn't work. that is the paper falls out instead of gliding smoothly out onto the output bin.
One thing I learned is that a ten year old inkjet printer is dirty inside. With lots of small dried up drops of ink that fall out everywhere and when you try to brush them up you get nice black smears.
Another thing I learn is that inkjet ink printed on paper will wash off with water but the same ink printed on fingers, clothes, desktops or anywhere else doesn't wash off at all.
Translated form the tear-off calendar :
Men, says a famous actress, are exactly like teeth. It takes a while to get them. Once you have them they hurt and bother you at times. And when they are gone they leave an emptiness behind.
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