Took me 45 minutes to fix a printer that just needed a paper clip

My home printer started jamming every single page yesterday. I spent like half an hour taking out the drum, cleaning rollers, even shaking it like a magic 8 ball. Finally I found a tiny piece of a paper clip stuck in the pickup roller assembly. Has anyone else wasted a whole evening on something that dumb?

3 comments

3 Comments

bennett.harper26d agoMost Upvoted

Found the exact same thing in a work copier last week. Little bent piece of metal from a paper clip that must've fallen in when someone was trying to unjam it wrong. Here's the thing nobody talks about - those paper clips get hot and brittle inside the machine, so they snap off and hide in places you'd never think to look. I've also found staples, bits of tape, and one time a half-eaten gummy bear stuck to the fuser roller. The real trick is that most jams aren't even paper problems, they're foreign object problems that people cause by stuffing random stuff in there. Next time check the pickup rollers first with a flashlight before you start pulling everything apart.

mark_ward26d ago

Haha @calebc40 called it, do you think most people even realize they're jamming it worse when they start yanking on the paper?

calebc4026d agoTop Commenter

bennett.harper that gummy bear story is hilarious but also terrifying. Nobody thinks about the heat those machines generate. I worked in a print shop for a summer and we found a melted pen cap once. But here's the angle nobody brings up: those paperclips and staples are usually from people trying to fix a jam with whatever's on their desk. They grab a pen or a pair of scissors and shove it in there, then something drops off and gets lost forever. That's the real problem. People panic when a jam happens and make it ten times worse. If everyone just hit the cancel button and waited five seconds, half these repair calls would disappear.