Fire!

[synaesthesia]

Well, that was an interesting morning.

 

One of our hardest working printers (a xerox phaser 8860) decided it was going to go into a restart loop. Fine with no network cable plugged in, but with, just restarts constantly.

No matter, we've got a spare with a dodgy inkloader (just one heater plate was iffy). As that machine was brand new, decided to replace that heat plate with a good one from the now dead machine. Easy soldering job with 4 easy, large cable to PCB joints.

Half an hour of printer-stripping and soldering, job was done.

 

Plug it in.

Turn it on.

Life!

Excellent! LCD was coming on, it was making all the right noises.

NM asks "Nick, that's not right - what's that orange light?"

 

Said orange light was fire. Something had entirely melted the heat plate - the temperature must have been immense!

No idea what caused it, soldering/joints were absolutely fine :/

 

If anyone happens to have an ink loader for a Xerox 8860DN we'd be very interested!

[mac_shinobi]

lol ahhahahaha - reminds me of the I.T crowd, Moss sending an email to the fire department, Fire ! Exclamation mark, Fire ! Exclamation mark etc

 

If it was restarting with the network cable connected - would it be easier to swap the network cards / boards over or are they a full thing ie network port is on the main board ?

 

Or a bit of RTFM'ing as prolly a way to get into the service mode to reset the network card memory etc ?

Edited December 7, 2012 by mac_shinobi

[synaesthesia]

All integrated. The main idea however wasn't about ease, but extending the life of the machine. The spare was pretty much brand new. This thing had seen many tens of thousands of pages since installation. Could have replaced the electronics board easily but quality on the original wasn't great with it's age.

[mac_shinobi]

Prolly a heat sensor that was missed when you ( using the word lightly as in whoever did the swap over ) didn't put or transfer the relevant sensors across. Like small diodes in the correct places of the heating unit, if they were transferred, just wondering if the ones in the printer that over heated had duff or dodgy sensors ??

 

Maybe it kept providing the heating unit with power and was waiting for the sensor to indicate that its at the correct temp and due to dodgy / failed sensor it just kept heating and heating etc

Edited December 7, 2012 by mac_shinobi

[Geoff]

Ugh, that's terrible engineering if it's true. You should never design things to fail 'on' you should ensure that if anything goes wrong it all turns off and comes to a complete stop in as carefully a control manner as possible under the circumstances.

[jmak]

Gave me a genuine laugh out loud moment just reading the entry on the recent posts list:

 

Fire! Started by synaesthesia

 

Thought you must have had a really bad week

[synaesthesia]

Can't always be the case - it did at least completely isolate itself from any of the main electronics, the rest of the printer is entirely unaffected.

 

There's very little to the heatplates - literally just a plate that heats up the wax which then drips onto the printhead below. Couple of diodes for regulation on the plate's reverse and everything looked intact. But looks can indeed be deceiving. Maybe the solder I used provided too much or too little resistance also.

[mac_shinobi]

Gave me a genuine laugh out loud moment just reading the entry on the recent posts list:

 

Fire! Started by synaesthesia

 

Thought you must have had a really bad week

 

If you need any electronic components disposing of ..... lol

 

Only kidding @synaesthesia

[synaesthesia]

Off the record not-quite-WEEE-disposal. We've got form for that round our way! (looks slightly towards Kettering)

[mac_shinobi]

Off the record not-quite-WEEE-disposal. We've got form for that round our way! (looks slightly towards Kettering)

 

In all fairness I most likely would have done the same ( not on purpose mind you ) .....

[rad]

Did you have a fire evacuation?

 

That would be even more embarrassing

[synaesthesia]

No, it wasn't that big. Just confined to the inside of the printer and out before I took it apart to wonder why.

[twin--turbo]

I had a HP in bits today, after replacing the toner it was making an awful noise. But the user said it had been like that for a while.

 

The culprit? a label wrapped round the yellow drum causing the drive to struggle to rotate.

 

Rob

[rich_tech]

thread made me think of the time about 5 years ago, that I wondered what the orange light was coming out of my PC case to look in and see a 2 inch flame off one of the capacitors before the motherboard powered off and went to a better place

[SYNACK]

thread made me think of the time about 5 years ago, that I wondered what the orange light was coming out of my PC case to look in and see a 2 inch flame off one of the capacitors before the motherboard powered off and went to a better place

 

That reminds me of Apple PPC build quality, had two do that after their holiday slumber.

[sjatkn]

Thankfully we have yet to set fire to any of our kit. We just get staff phoning up saying their printers are on fire, usually first thing Monday morning after a cold weekend when the paper has absorbed a load of moisture. It takes a minute or two to convince them it's only steam. Never have understood why the phone us rather than hitting the fire alarm and legging it away from the fire!

 

In a previous job working as a technician in a University Physics dept a colleague managed to set a litter bin on fire. He had cleaned out an experiment containing what he though was oxidized sodium metal, he tossed the remains in a bin containing a banana skin. The sodium wasn't as oxidised as he thought and the next thing we knew was a lot of smoke coming out of the bin as the moisture in the banana skin reacted with the sodium. From that point on we tossed the remains in a beaker of water, it was much more fun as well as being safer.