Laserjet 5l troubles

[marshm68]

Alright so I recently got a Laserjet 5L printer to use for school. It was free, and I'd been wanting a laser printer that uses toner for a while because I dread buying overpriced ink cartridges every other week. I got it installed pretty quickly, but it hasn't been working exactly as expected. The first few test pages I printed showed nothing except for some very light horizontal grey lines that repeated on down the page. At this point, I took out the toner cartridge and tried to shake it carefully, hoping to relieve any toner stuck in there (the printer has not been in use for a very long time). While doing this, i noticed that that the photosensitive green drum inside the toner cartridge was pretty much covered in toner; there was patches of toner all over the drum, and sometimes even globs of toner stuck to it that were ~1/2 mm high. Being someone who knows nothing about laser printers, I figured this was not right, so I took a paper towel to the photosensitive drum and tried to clean all of the toner off of it. I used the gear on the one side of the drum to rotate it as I wiped it down (this was really stupid of me, I know). I stopped after I realized that the drum was just picking up more toner after each rotation. I put the toner cartridge back in the printer and tried another test page. This time I could see what the test page was supposed to look like, but it still wasn't very good at all. The whole page is gray, whatever is printed is repeated lightly ~3 inches below (this is clear in the picture), and sometimes there are little blobs of just solid toner that I can peel off the paper. After repeatedly printing test pages, this was the best I could get it to look. Will a simple toner replacement solve this problem, or is it something with the printer itself?

I opened up the printer again after this, and noticed that the toner cartridge had leaked a little toner all around the inside of the printer. I managed to get it cleaned up with some compressed air, but it looks like the transfer roller is coated in toner. Is this a bad thing? I know it's bad to touch the transfer roller, so I'm not entirely sure how to go about cleaning it if it's not supposed to have any toner on it.

Any help will be greatly appreciated, thank you.

 

[hang-the-9]

Looks like you need to replace the fuser. And from the sound of the mess that was made, a new toner cartridge. There is a fuser cleaning utility from HP, but I doubt it will clear things up for you. http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=bpl03799

Fuser: http://www.imagingsupplies.com/supplies/hp-laserjet-5l-fuser-assembly-1158.cfm Not necesseratly from that site, but that's the part you want. Truthfully, you are better off buying a new HP home Laser Printer. Or a used working one.

 

[printerman]

if changing the toner cartridge is does not solve, its the fuser! located at the front lower part of the printer, you will need to tear down the printer.
Always a reason why its free! but once you get it fixed, it is a VERY good printer.

 

[marshm68]

Just got my new toner cartridge. It seems to have fixed everything. The transfer roller cleaned up after a few prints, and I'm not longer getting any scatter. Thanks for the help guys, awesome printer so far

 

[marshm68]

Best answer selected by marshm68.