Hewlitt-Packard Laserjet printer

Last night I went out on my pre-trashday scouting ride with a bit of urgency. My junk supply had dwindled to almost zero, so I was looking for pretty much anything to scrap and write about. The sew/vac place wasn't throwing out anything but boxes, so I had to expand my search, which was still somewhat geographically limited since I'm using a bike. It was looking like I wasn't going to find anything, when I headed down a side street on a whim. And wouldn't you know, it paid off pretty well: a laserjet printer. Whoever tossed it even wrapped up the cord, so I didn't have to deal with it as I was transporting the printer home.

I really like scrapping printers. By their nature, they have to have a certain number of mechanical parts; you can't move a sheet of paper from one tray to another with a printed circuit board. And the parts are usually in 'layers,' for want of a better word. Removing a panel or circuit board often opens up a new set of parts.

I disassembled the paper tray just because I could, not because there were any parts of practical use or visual interest. It's just another activity on the Dead Printer Playset.

This access panel alows you to remove the cord, presumably for storage purposes, without having to take it directly off of the circuit board. Rather convenient, actually, though I'm going to be getting to the board anyway.

Here's the naked printer, without it's housing. The camera flash washes out the detail, but you get the idea. Notice the couple of shards of plastic toward the bottom of the photo. Printer housings are generally a pain to get off, and chucks inevitably get broken off in the process, but the plastic was unusually brittle. It's ABS plastic, which usually has more give than this. Even if this printer was sitting on front of a window, I can't imagine the UV degrading the plastic to that degree.

The 'laser' part of the laserjet printer. I think this is the first laserjet I've taken apart, all the other printers I've done were either inkjet or dot matrix. It's interesting to see what the laser setup actually looks like.

The obligatory bank of gears. And like most printers, only about two-thirds of them come off without damage, if they come off at all.

Behold the mess I made! Not that I'm usually precise or organized about scrapping, but after a long stretch of lackluster disassemblies, I couldn't help but be somewhat reckless with this one. Sort of like a kid at Christmas.

Now, that's a respectable trophy pile.