HP 2100 fuser error

[stevel]

My trusty HP 2100 stopped working last night, all 3 lights were lit. I found the service manual, pressed the two buttons and found the top light went out (bottom two were lit) indicating an error 50 - fuser problem.

So, I removed the fuser to see if there was anything visibly wrong, all looked good. I put everything back, still same error. I did a cold reset - still same error. Since mechanically it looked fine, I figured it must be the heater, so I put an ohm meter across the element (as near as I can tell - connector with the 2 heaver gauge wires) and it read about 25 ohms, which would be a few hundred watts at 120V, so that seemed OK.

Before I pull out the board that powers the fuser, any suggestions? I hate to buy a new fuser when a used 2100 can be had for about $40 on ebay, or a brand new laser printer for a little over $100 - and a I am not sure it's the fuser to begin with.

I don't know how many pages it has on it (can't print!), but probably very low - I inherited it when we closed down an office back in about 2005 where it saw light use, and it's printed maybe 1000-2000 pages since then (I have only changed the toner cartridge once). I like that there's a service manual, and it's well built - I like to fix things! It's been flawless and excellent print quality right up till the moment it died...

I am thinking of disconnecting the heater power and looking for 120VAC on startup - I assume it heats the fuser when you first turn it on? If there's nothing there, I guess the relay / triac or whatever switches the load is bad, or the driving circuit. Does anyone dive this deep when troubleshooting?

Thanks!

Steve

[Big Al]

These machines are difficult to troubleshoot because of the inexpensive display panel. I think you should just buy a replacement printer and save the old one for parts. These are good printers, a bit slow, but well made. Had one on my bench the other day with 268K pages. I checked our database and it had never been repaired! Still working fine!
Al

[stevel]

Rather than buy a fuser for $40-60 on ebay, I bought a whole replacement 2100 - this one is a MT model with 17K pages, and I got it for what the cheapest fuser assembly I could find would have cost - $42 shipped! It works, I put the fuser in my broken one and it works too, so a new fuser will make it go - good to know. The engine only has 10871 pages on it, I am probably going to keep using it - maybe I'll move the RAM/ROM module over to it.

Heh, I just moved the module over and now my printer has PostScript (according the the config page) and an extra 4Meg.

I got another HP toner cartridge out of the deal too. ;)

Steve

[Big Al]

I did not think that would work. The 2200 and 2300 have a RAM Disk section in the DIMM and you need a different DIMM to get more memory.
Good work guy!
Al