Printer problems, dog doo dilemma, transformed
So as I mentioned last week, my neighbor had a problem with his HP 3800DN printer where a little plastic piece broke off and the repair shop told him it would take 400 bucks to fix. (and the part wouldn’t be in until Mid-August) I scoffed at this and told my neighbor I would dig into the problem myself. Well I found the kit needed to fix the issue and it arrived on Friday. It was all in a small padded envelope.
So when I got home I ripped it open and pulled out the pouch with 4 replacement little plastic pieces as well as another envelope that had springs that get mounted on the little plastic things. Then, I pulled out the instructions….
It didn’t take me long to realize that I may have bitten off more than I expected to chew. The instructions were very long although there were lots of pictures illustrating things. I got a bad feeling in my stomach, I knew this was going to be a pain in the ass.
So I wanted to not put it off, I started on it. Taking things apart was a bit difficult, it always is the first time you rip into something as I remember all too well from my half decade of printer repair. It didn’t take me long to realize that this tear down was right up there with some of the most difficult ones I ever did.
After an hour or so I had it disassembled to the point where it had to be to get access to the little plastic pieces that had to be replaced. I took some pictures along the way. 
When you take something like this apart, you are trying to keep track of what went where. I kept my piles of screws organized and in certain situations would tape the screws onto the parts they came from.
So I finally get to start putting the new parts in. It is tedious as hell. I am using tweezers, needle nose pliers and awkward hand/finger angles to get the new arms into place. Thank goodness I still had my magnetic screwdriver, that is a lifesaver with these sorts of jobs. I eventually get the arms in place or so I think and have to start one the worst parts of any repair job, reassembly.
I plodded through the process, encountering several snags along the way as I struggled to recall exactly how everything went back together. Again, the instructions helped quite a bit. I get it all back together and come to the moment of truth. I insert the cartridges, fire it up and wait. The initial warm up looks good although the gear train made a noise during parts of it. Then the LCD shows “cartridge not detected”, DAMN IT.
So of course this means another rip down was required to figure out what was wrong. Each time you do it, it goes a little faster, it’s a good thing because I got TONS of rip down experience. On Friday night I finally packed it in about 10:30, still with the same issue, still not detecting the CYAN cartridge.
I started fresh Saturday morning, sometimes stepping away from a problem like this clears the head and you start back and things go better. Such was the case with this. After my 5th or 6th rip down, I finally realized that I did wrong and got everything lined up so that all the cartridges were detected. However, there still was the noise during warm up. I brought the printer online, printed a test page and viola, it works! I called my neighbor and told him it was printing again, albeit with a noise that I did not know the source of. I didn’t know if the noise was a result of the part that broke falling into the gear train and chipping something or possibly from whatever tear down the shop he took it to may have performed. All I knew was the parts I replaced were in and after spending 5 or 6 hours on the thing, I just didn’t want to dick with it much more.
My neighbor picked up the printer, took it home but then called me shortly afterwards to tell me the duplexing wasn’t working and that there was some print imaging issue on the left side of the paper. Argh! Well of course I couldn’t abandon the problem so I told him to bring it back over. Luckily the duplexing issue was a simple one, I simply forgot to plug one wiring harness back in. However the imaging problem I had no clue on. My initial suspicion is the cyan cartridge could be defective as I noticed some discoloration on the drum of it that looked like it shouldn’t be there. The bad thing is a cartridge for this costs $125 – $150 bucks, it is a an expensive thing to buy if you don’t need one. It also still makes the noise during warm up, which I am not thrilled about. I am considering asking for it back one more time in an attempt to fix the noise. This definitely was much more of a project than I was anticipating.
The rest of my Saturday was pretty busy with house chores and then we cleaned up and went over to our friend’s house for dinner. It was Taylor’s 30th birthday. Over birthday pizza I relayed the horrors of my physical and more specifically my unexpected prostate exam. It drew many laughs as I expected it would. Later we played some Boulderdash which was a lot of fun. Ali cleared every one’s clock, finishing the game with the next closest person only being halfway across the board.
Sunday morning got off to a very bad start. Oddly, it was 7:20 and Nicki had not woken me up yet so I got out of bed on my own. Three feet outside our bedroom door was a disgusting stream of cat yutz. Later I realized it was actually ribbon covered in cat yutz as our dumb ass cat Spook chewed and ate ribbon off of a gift basket that I stupidly left on the dining room table. So before I address anything I walk straight to the sink to wet a paper towel and begin the clean up process. As I turn the corner I am hit by another horrific sight, a small wet pile of dog shit!!!!!!!!!!
This was now the third time in the span of a week that Nicki has done this. No wonder she didn’t wake me up, she didn’t want me to see it. The night before, I intentionally took her out late to give her every opportunity to relieve herself, she only did a number 1 and walked herself right back to the door to go inside. Of course I was extremely angry. After cleaning up the cat puke, I left the dog shit be, I figured when Ali got up we could again work on it, I didn’t want to wake her up with it.
When Nicki finally came out to the office, she slinked under my desk and laid at my feet submissively. I didn’t acknowledge her. Eventually I got up and walked to the slider to take her out. I waited for her to round the corner so I could scold her when she was next to her pile of stink. She came around, saw me and as soon as I started scolding her, she went back into the office and wedged herself behind my desk, hiding.
I just don’t why this is going on. The pile isn’t huge and is runny so that means she wasn’t holding it long. Any other time she will bug me when she has to go out but for whatever reason, even though she knows it is bad, she is doing middle of the night dog shit bombs. When Ali got up I informed her of the latest disaster. Before she got a chance to start on clean up I had already scooped up the majority of it and was working on phase 2 clean up.
This has got to stop. I told Ali that maybe Nicki needs to go to the vet, that maybe there is something going on that is making her feel like she has to go, like diarrhea pains that people get. It sucks that now I can’t trust her to not mess up the house when left alone. I just happened to have planned to steam clean the rugs on Sunday, good timing. If I wake up to another pile of shit on my freshly cleaned carpet, I am going to FREAK OUT. Last night I again took her out late, she again didn’t do a number 2 but we closed the closet and bedroom door so she would not be able to sneak out and do her mess. At least for last night, it worked, there were no land mines this morning.
Late yesterday I watched the new Transformers movie. It was entertaining and funnier than I thought it would be. It didn’t take itself that seriously which was a good thing. The special effects are incredible with armies of transforming things everywhere. The action though was almost too fast, too visibly busy to really appreciate the detail in the robots. During the climactic final fight scenes I had a hell of a hard time figuring out which robots were good and which ones were bad which was rather annoying. Of course the ending was predictably cheesy and unrealistic but I would expect nothing less. The movie also was one big GM commercial, featuring all GM vehicle transforming robots, most notably Bumblebee who transforms into the brand new Chevy Camaro. It was a good move by them. That Camaro looks SHARP! Damn I would love to get one. Anyway, the movie wasn’t bad, I doubt I would have wanted to pay 20 bucks to see it in the theater but it is a no brainer as a $3.99 rental. B-