The big problem with any printer is that once you purchase it and start to use it, there are really no detailed instructions that teach you how to maintain the printer on a day to day basis. As a result people tend to misuse the printers and somehow assume that they will take care of themselves. This is the beginning of the end.
Can you imagine someone that purchased a new car and week after week, month after month, did nothing to the car except put in more gas and never opened the hood to check the oil, or the water, or the battery, or anything else. What do you think would happen in about a year? It could be a disaster for that car.
What this website hopes to do is to provide the correct information to all printer users on how to do this "Everyday Maintainence". To do this I have provided many "How to..." instructional files in the PDF format for people to down load to their own computers. Many times these short documents can provide the immediate help to others to allow them to find and fix their own printer problems. It provides them the information on where to look, what to look for, and how to fix it.
Sometimes the fix is not that simple and the printer needs to be taken apart and most people are "Terrified" by just the thought of doing that. I know that feeling very well as I experienced it myself 12 years ago when one day after a typical winter power outage my printer would not turn back on. Being an Electrical Engineer with lots of experience I decided to just "Jump in" and take the covers off. That was a major effort in itself, as printers are designed by the manufacturers on purpose to prevent everyday people from taking them apart. I did it anyway and almost broke the covers, but I got the top cover off. As soon as I did it took my breath away. I said out loud, "Oh my god", and was shocked at the complexity of cables, connectors, levers, tabs, logic cards, etc. I studied everything for a good 20 minutes and still could find no way to get at and attempt to fix the power unit of that printer. It happened to be a "Lexmark" printer and I have since learned over the years that many printers are designed NOT TO BE REPAIRED.
The Printer Business is such a competitive industry that is has become a cut throat business in that the companies design their printers to be a cheap as possible so they can sell them at such a low cost the temptation for most people is to purchase the lowest cost unit. Then the Manufacturer's make their money selling the ink. How can you tell which companies do this,..it is easy,.. just look around and see which companies provide local service centers where you can take your printer if it needs repair. Find out which company even provides factor service or replacement parts, or even has real technical support. Over the years I have done all of this and found the only company that does this is Canon. Many people may dispute this but the evidence speaks for itself.
As I said above,.. sometimes the problems are so deep inside the printer that you have to take them apart just to find the problem. This happened to me a few years later when I had a printing problem with my Canon i560 printer and could not get it to print correctly. This time I decided to be a little more careful in taking the printer apart. I had found some information someplace on the internet (can't remember where as it was 10 years ago) on how to get the covers off. This helped a great deal and I continued on to find the problem and fix it. I also found that I had to take the printer apart all the way down to the bare chassis to get at the waste ink absorbers and clean and replace them. At that point I decided to start over again and take detailed pictures of each and every step I had used to take the covers off and get at the problem. I also took pictures of EVERYTHING inside of the printer. I had decided to put all of this information, pictures, and detailed instructions and to make a basic Repair Manual for the Canon i560 printer. As you can imagine this document turned out to be very large considering that I took all pictures with a Digital Camera using high resolution images. This allows the reader to "ZOOM" the image inside Adobe Reader to as much as 500% so that EVERY detail can be seen. The end result is much better than just a "Book" with a tiny image that is hard to see. It is almost like having a book displayed on a HDTV.
Word got around my local community and people started bringing me their printers to fix. I did this as a hobby and I helped a lot of people. Before I knew it I had taken apart and fixed 5 more different model printers, including some Hewlett Packard and Epson printers. As I did this I took all of the pictures of every step and learned the hard way which were right and which were wrong. In my spare time I started creating more Repair Manuals for each printer. As I did this I began to create a standard outline and a table of contents that could be used for all printers. At that point I decided to make these Repair Manuals, and a host of other useful information available on a CD at a very reasonable price, since I also provide my additional support when people get stuck or lost or confused.
Over the last 10 years I have created over 65 different printer Repair Manuals, most of which are for Canon Printers. During this time I have also been a contributor to several website that help people with their printer problems such as the "Nifty-Stuff" website and the "Fixyourownprinter" website. I continue to support these websites as I believe they provide a great service to help anyone on basic problem. When the problems get to complex to resolve with simple solutions I always refer them to my Repair Manual CD's.
On this website you will see my list of PDF files that provide a long list of detailed information, suggestions, and educational material to teach people about printers. The educational documents explain how the detailed inkjet process works in everyday terms so that people can really understand what is going on everytime they print something. It is my view that once people become aware of this information and learn about the process they can quickly see the first signs of when something is going wrong with their printer. This is very key in printer technology as the faster you can detect a problem the soon it will be fixed. I believe that 95% of all the failures that people have with their prints happens because the do see the problem or wait to long to take action.
If people took daily maintenance of their printers they would eliminate 95% of the problems with printers. That is what this BLOG is all about.
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