4350 duplex problem

[kiwi]

Hello all,
looking for help with an intermittent duplex problem on a 4350. Fault occurs when the paper is drawn back into the printer to be turned over. Paper will stop with the leading edge about 4 inches /100 mm out of the duplex unit going into turnaround. Dulpex unit was swapped with another an fault still occurs.
Maintenance kit was fitted about two weeks ago (fault was occurring before kit installed). Printer ran fine for about a week before fault reoccurred.
I cannot see anything that could be blocking the paper, but anyway, sometimes it will print multi page duplex jobs fine, other times not.

Any suggestions gratefully accepted
Thanks
Pete

[cs_steve]

Try a different fuser ... you might be able to get a warranty fuser issued since you just installed the maint. kit...

[redcow]

Steve. I've got a 4350dtn doing the same thing as the other printer in this thread.
Maintenance kit was installed, because the "maintenance" msg was being displayed.
The problem existed before the kit was installed. The duplexer was changed, as was the
DC Controller, the duplexer pendulum assembly, duplexer again, and the fuser again.

They do have an envelope feeder attached, I never thought to remove it to see if the symptoms
change. I do have a formatter and a power supply ordered.

Every once in a great while the duplexer starts working, it might be for a few days, but it will fail again.

Any ideas????

[ridered74]

Is it getting a 13.12.00 error?

I've only run into duplexing errors at one particular customer, but we saw it 9-10 times at each of their locations across the state. Every one of them was in a warehouse environment and the printers were filthy inside and out. We would take them completely apart and clean them as well as possible, but no one particular part ever seemed to fix it for any length of time. It sounds dumb, but our standard practice became replacing the fuser, pendulum assembly, duplexor and power supply in addition to a thorough cleaning. Once we started doing that, it was rare that one would get called in for that within the next year.

[cs_steve]

Redcow , I talked to one of our techs and he had one other idea --> it could be a weird timing issue, he mentioned the common problem with a sticking solenoid on paper pickup assembly for Tray 2 (or Tray 1, 3, etc). If the solenoid is sticking intermittently, and paper enters the path too early, that could trigger a jam in the duplexer area. That possibility makes the most sense to me since you've changed everything in the rear of the machine. To verify, you could try running a stack of duplex pages from Tray 1 to make sure that works fine. If so, then clean or replace that Tray 2 solenoid.

[ridered74]

Redcow , I talked to one of our techs and he had one other idea --> it could be a weird timing issue, he mentioned the common problem with a sticking solenoid on paper pickup assembly for Tray 2 (or Tray 1, 3, etc). If the solenoid is sticking intermittently, and paper enters the path too early, that could trigger a jam in the duplexer area. That possibility makes the most sense to me since you've changed everything in the rear of the machine. To verify, you could try running a stack of duplex pages from Tray 1 to make sure that works fine. If so, then clean or replace that Tray 2 solenoid.


The problem with that is tray 1 runs at about half speed of tray 2, so if the problem is only intermittent at full speed, it isn't really ruling out the tray 2 solenoid even if it prints 50 duplexed from tray 1 without jamming. Tray 2 solenoid is a good call tho, it's cheap enough and fails often enough that it's worth replacing just to rule it out as the culprit.

[redcow]

Thanks all for the suggestions.
Friday I went to the site with a power supply and a formatter.
Being born lazy, I pulled the envelope feeder from the printer and ran "paper path test' with the duplexer enabled.
The printer failed. Paper is 3/4 of the way in the duplexer. It never gets an error msg on the display. It just stops feeding and the data lite blinks.
The display says "paper path test tray 2" and nothing else.
Anyway the lazy in me did not want to pull the power supply, unless absolutely neccessary. So, I swapped out the
formatter. Tested good duplexing. Still running good Tuesday and Wednesday. Closed the call.