ET-8550 knocking noise and print head "stutter"

[schnoberts]

Hi,

I've observed some unexpected features of my ET-8550 and I'm interested if anyone else is experiencing these as normal behaviour or has found them problematic and resolved them.

1. My printer often has a knocking noise, one knock per return-journey of the print head, somewhere around the middle of the path. This isn't all the time, but probably occurs every 2-3 A3 pages and continues for most of the page.
2. On one page the printer has got itself into an odd state part way through printing where the head has come back to the home position and then seems to get stuck. An attempt to move the head happens, then it stops and moves it back and this repeated every couple of seconds until I cancelled the job. It has not re-occurred.
3. Most of my pages of paper feed fine and then I get the odd one that doesn't feed from the rear cassette. What I observe is the page enters the feed a little and is then pushed out with a small kick. This continues with a general whirring/grinding and then it stops and complains there's a paper jam. There isn't, there's no paper anywhere in the paper path. Eventually with some jiggling it feeds. Often it then feeds slightly at an angle and thus the print is ruined. This is worse if I am doing manual duplex and re-feeding paper that is already been through. I used to have a big old Stylus Pro A2 printer and that was awful for feeding paper, it basically need manual intervention every other page, so maybe this is just an Epson feature.

The printer is clean, nozzle checks and alignment checks are correct. It's printed around 600 pages so far. It has the latest firmware.

Has anyone experienced these behaviours?

Kind regards,

Andy

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I'm using an ET-8550 , but it's currently offline since I have some construction going on, so I cannot try to duplicate the effects you are experiencing

Ad 1 - can you lift the scanner and watch the head movement, specifically the tubing during printing , you may find and deactivate the sensor which detects the scanner being lifted up. It could be that the tubes and/or the carrier band for the tubes is hitting the case from the inside, there was a similar problem with the ET-7750 already.

Ad 2 - Since the problem did not re-occur it's difficult to do something.

Ad 3 - you have some paper feed problems - what type of paper is affected ? Can you feed this paper from the other paper bin - switching between the bottom and the rear bin - and does that make a difference ? Does it make a difference whether the bin is (almost) empty or almost full ? Does it happen with all paper types or just some specific ones ? Did you have such paper feed problems since the beginning ? Does the format make a difference - A4 vs. A3 ?

- I assume that the printer is still under warranty ? I think that this could be a warranty case for Epson.

 

[schnoberts]

Hi,

Thank you for the advice. I’ll take a look at this all today. The paper is A3 210gsm Matt double sidedness. The same thickness as Epson Matt. The feed issue is worse when the bin is empty but when I think about it it is almost always on the second feed (manual duplex) so perhaps the edges are curled a little in one direction. I’ll have to check.

Thanks again , I’ll check tube/cabling etc.