Metal Swing Plate Comments

[woodss]

I have purchased a Swing Plate Kit from this printertechs company, the customer service was superb and, Steve was a great sales person.

My question is how long will the metal swing plate gear last for?
For the life of the machine or for a few fuser kit cycles.

the Unit that this is installed in the unit doesnt make any noises, its pretty quiet machine.

[ptjeff1]

Hi Stewart -- we have tested our metal swing plate gear to over 1 million pages worth of use. At 1 million pages the gear still worked flawlessly. The teeth started to show some minor wear but I would guess you could get another million pages out of it. We have yet to hear of anyone wearing one out.

[woodss]

Hi Stewart -- we have tested our metal swing plate gear to over 1 million pages worth of use. At 1 million pages the gear still worked flawlessly. The teeth started to show some minor wear but I would guess you could get another million pages out of it. We have yet to hear of anyone wearing one out.

It prob last for 32 years then, with my level of use.
Printer would have died by then.

I only have done nearly 60,000 copies in 2 years, only lightly used.
How long would it take to print one million pages?

[woodss]

Is there a chance of the metal gear to ruin the white gear of the swing plate assembly?
There is some in the laser printer industry that feel that this metal gear will cause the white gear to fail, and I would like your thoughts.

[woodss]

Here is a video report, about my thoughts about the gear.


http://youtu.be/H9V6Z1Pl5z8

This investigation has found that there is skeptics of the metal swing plate gear, some technicians think that the metal gear can do more damage to the machine's swing plate assembly, I thought to make the customer service staff to be aware of this.


The metal swing plate gear in my mind is about the utimate improvement to world's most popular office printer's swing plate assembly.

[ptjeff1]

I've been meaning to reply to this post for a while...I wasn’t aware that there were any doubts in the printer tech community regarding the metal gear.

This is a rough sketch showing how the gears are oriented in the printer. It is worth noting we have put a sealed bearing in the center of the brass gear to smoothen out the rotation and reduce wobble and friction. With the original plastic gear, the gear bore wears down and the gear can wobble on its axel.
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Occasionally we will get asked, won’t the metal gear wear out the plastic gears? No. Over time, our metal gear causes LESS wear on the white plastic gear, not more. You have to think about how gears work. It isn’t like a knife which has a very sharp cutting edge. Gear teeth have flat surfaces that move across each other. Here is a good link describing gear wear and failure http://www.mt-online.com/component/content/article/177-january2000/570-failure-analysis-for-gearing.html Coefficients of friction are important to consider. Gear teeth slide across each other during rotation thus the sliding friction between gear materials is very important. Gear teeth of similar materials result in higher friction (in non-lubricated systems). The lower the number, the lower the sliding friction. Lower numbers are better. Here are some examples.
Coefficient of sliding friction for steel on steel is ~0.8
Coefficient of sliding friction for Nylon-Nylon is ~0.35
Coefficient of sliding friction for polyethylene on steel is ~0.2
The higher sliding friction of plastic gear teeth on plastic gear teeth causes higher wear than metal teeth on plastic teeth.
If you still have doubts about metal and plastic gears working together, consider that HP has used metal gears with plastic gears in several printers where plastic just didn’t offer enough wear resistance. For those who have worked on Laserjets 8100 & 8150 the gear that drives the fuser is metal, the Laserjet 4-Plus has a metal gear in the fuser (RS5-0231), and there also was a metal gear in the 5si/8000 fuser (RS5-0751).

I'll post a more detailed article on our new website...coming soon!