Fixing the Printer

I finally reached the point where I needed to fix my Laser Printer. My Kyocera FS-1030DN has been serving me well for years and whilst the print quality is as good as they day I bought it I have had a problem with the page alignment. I have been loosing the top and bottom of pages which has been irritating.

I found a Techspot forum post detailing a solution.

Adrian123 Just fixed mine tonight with the help of Google Translate and a german printer forum…

The cause is small piece of foam rubber tape on the registration clutch solenoid, which gets slightly sticky with age and affects the timing of the paper mechanism.

If you’re reasonably comfortable dismantling stuff (and reassembling successfully!) it’s not hard to fix. It helps to get the service manual, which has nice diagrams of how the parts can be removed - Google “fs-1020d service manual”.

Here goes:

Lift out the “process unit” (toner and drum).

Remove the top cover - 2 screws.

Remove the thumbscrews from the rear to get at the option slots.

Remove the right side cover - about 6 or 8 plastic clips (service manual shows where).

Disconnect the 12 cables from the engine board (the one with 12 cables ;-)

Remove the engine board - 3 screws.

Unclip a few wires and remove the light-grey plastic cover (1 screw).

You’ll now see 3 solenoids (coils with metal levers attached; mine had the coils wrapped in blue tape). Top right one is likely the main culprit, but probably worth looking at all of them. Take the solenoids off one at a time - 1 screw each.

There’s a small piece of 0.5mm foam tape that’s supposed to stop the solenoid from clicking too loudly when the magnet pulls the lever in, and it’s probably very gooey. I scraped off the goo and replaced it with some foam tape I cut down thin with a razor blade. You could probably just omit it altogether or cover the goo with some adhesive tape.

Reverse to reassemble - good luck!

Well I tried out the method described and it worked a treat. I did indeed have sticky residue on the solenoids which I cleaned off. I reassembled the unit and ran a few print tests.The following pictures show the results, before print on the left, after print on the right.

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