Many (26?) years ago a new Hewlett Packard HP4L printer came into our lives and, other than a drum replacement due to low-usage, has worked faultlessly in all that time. This is not our only printer, but it produces clean, permanent black and white printing on A4 paper, essentially for the cost of the paper.
Just before going on holiday last week, half way through a physics GCSE paper, the usual quiet sound (as of a page being gently torn, followed by a few clicks and a hum) was replaced by a strident grinding noise.
Out came the (perfectly standard) screwdrivers, the Web immediately produced a PDF service manual, off came the lid and, after finding where to defeat the case-off detection sensors, it became apparent that the problem was the first nylon gear in the power chain, on the motor spindle. Close examination revealed that it had cracked, probably due to the ingress of a small hard black particle wedging two teeth apart and cracking the gear down to the shaft. Fifteen minutes on ebay and a replacement was sourced from the US for around ten pounds sterling. Yesterday it arrived; it was fitted this morning, and the physics paper set off to printing just where it had left off.
This demonstrates the best of the Internet and the original printer design, but it is not the sort of happy outcome that can be relied on with modern equipment. For colour printing we have had a selection of mostly free, cast-off printers over the years. The most recent to die was an HP 7310, a fine printer except for a serious design flaw in the too-fragile ink carriage. This results in a difficult repair job when an escaped spring pierces (very precisely) a flexible PCB, killing the print cartridge detection mechanism. No-where on the Web is there a tear-down of this printer, although there are several signs that many people have searched on a variety of forums. Having learnt how to do the tear down my self, I can see why it is not described anywhere and, having been unable to get the spare part, I haven't yet tried to reverse the procedure.
All that iStuff is designed, AFAIK, to be virtually impossible to take apart without specialised tools and my experience of repairing compact cameras is that the guts of these wear out so fast that it is barely worth the trouble of fixing them before the lenses jam because the gear wear stalls the motors.
We have gone wrong somewhere. My HP4L is still a useful device, it fills a niche in my printing needs, but all the more youthful devices have gone the way of dust either through (criminal) use of DRM which expires the ink before it is even used, or through simple design flaws and lack of design for maintenance.
</rant>
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