HP Printers

[Tony Duell]

[HP Printer fuser]

> These parts are available, but expect to pay $30 to $50 each for a new lamp
> and tube.  The job is not that difficult if you know what you are doing, but
> substantially more difficult if you don't (big surprise, right?).

I don;t know what I'm doing, but I've stripped and rebuilt the fusers for 
the CX and SX engines. The most important thing to remember is that the 
'heater' is a quartz-halogen lamp, and you must not touch the 'glass' 
with your fingners. The CX one is difficult to handle (it's possible to 
hld it -- just -- by the ceramic end cap), the SX one can be handled by 
the wires.

There are quite a few parts in the fuser, but I've never had a problem 
with something like that.

> I have an actual factory service manual for the Laserjet II, I may scan it
> and make it into a PDF for the classic computer documentation effort.
> However, unlike Imsai, Altair, etc., HP is very much still in business and
> may take legal action if their copyrighted manuals are put on the web or

HP have been friendly about allowing the manuals (user and service) for 
their discontinued _calculator_ products to be distributed (I don't think 
they've given blanket permission, but there are web sites that have got 
official permision to do this). I don't know about printers, though.

Bear in mind that some of the copyright on that manual may actually be 
owned by Canon.

> Just a note on economic viability, you can buy entire working HP 4 printers
> -- HP 4 Plus, the 12ppm version -- for well under $50, so putting in a $60
> repair on a vastly inferior Laserjet II is of questionable economic
> viability.

Hey, this is classiccimp :-). What's economic viability got to do with it?

More seriously, I don;t think there was ever an 4-series with the VDO 
(direct 'video' interface). The CX-VDO exists, of course (the VDO 
interface is the 'native' interface to the DC controller in that 
printer), there's an SX-VDO (with an interface card in place of the 
formatter) and there's a VDO interface card that fits in the expansion 
slot of an LJ2. 

If you have one of the many classic computers that uses a VDO interface 
then yuu'll want to keep an SX-VDO running (the CX toner cartridges are 
getting very hard to find now). 

-tony