Shawn's Blog

a hair-band lovin', techni-junkie's banter about… whatever.

Fixing a Lexmark E332n that will not pick up paper.

Posted on | July 20, 2009 | 1 Comment

Last year, I wrote an article on “Fixing” a Brother MFC 240C Printer which explained how to bypass the “feature” of that printer which would not allow you to print in black if one of the colour cartridges was short of ink.  To this day, that article is the most popular article on my blog, and I’m still receiving e-mails on it.

I recently ran into trouble with a Lexmark E332n laser printer, where the printer would ty to pick up paper from the paper tray, but would return an “out of paper” error.  Fanning the paper would not work.  Inserting more paper into the tray, and less paper into the tray did not work either.  I verified that the toner & drum were working, ad the manual feed slot would work.

After googling the problem, I found that the rollers on the paper feeder needed replacing, part #56P1820.  I found the part on Lexmark Canada’s website, priced at $3.96.  Not bad, so I tried to create an account to order it.  To say that this was easy would be, well, lying.  I tried entering the form multiple times to create an account so I could place the order.  Each time, the website would generate an account number for me, and then send me back to the account creation page with an error about the account number being wrong.  Oh, in addition, it cleared out all of my information from the form.  User friendly.

Trying their list of preferred parts resellers came up empty as well, ad the part was listed as discontinued.  So I googled the part number, and came accross DirectDial.com who listed the part at $8.  Not too bad, I guess.  Going to the checkout was a different situation.  Add a $20 processing fee and a $18.00 shipping & insuarnce fee to what are essentially 2 rubber bands the size of a quarter is horrendous.

As a last resort, I removed the paper tray, and lowered the paper feed arm.  Removing the rubber rollers was a snap, just pull them off.  I turned the rollers inside out, and replaced them.  Put the paper back in the tray, and voila, all fixed for now.  Eventually this “fix” will run out when both sides of the rollers have worn down.  However, for a quick fix until you are able to find suitable replacement parts, this should work just fine.

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Category: Computers, Hacks
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Comments

One Response to “Fixing a Lexmark E332n that will not pick up paper.”

  1. jimbo
    November 19th, 2009 @ 11:48 pm

    Worked perfectly!

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