techrecovery | Nov. 12th, 2008

Dear father:

You are not saving any money by buying those shitty refill toner cartridges off eGhey. As a matter of fact, the next one, if it's like the last, may very well lead to your printer catching fire and taking the house with it.

Ever used a Laserjet 4000/4050? Well, mine is a 4000, upgraded to 4050 by stealing the formatter cage off of a dumpstered 4050 from school that someone decided to try picking up and carrying around by the top cover.

There's a nice little area after the backup roller/drum area where a set of side by side Delrin* bars glide the paper above a metal plate. This area was completely packed with tonershit... imagine the bottom of the cage for a bird with a really bad diet. It had just recently begun leaving skidmarks chopped with a roughly 1/10 inch pattern all over every page.

After finding a vaguely better looking remanufactured cartridge (this one having licensed the Polaroid brand name, apparently!), I unpacked it and pulled the seal strip off. POOF, toner went airborne in a great cloud.

At this point, he admits to me that some of the remanufactured cartridges he's been getting don't have the seal on them.

* Probably, if I know my thermoplastics.

Yeah.... I'm not dealing with his printer anymore.