Maintaining a dot-matrix printer includes a number of basic tasks. In this video, you’ll learn about ribbon replacement, print head replacement, and paper replacement.
Replacing the ribbon in a dot matrix printer is something that you will do from time to time, because this printer does lose ink. This is one very long printer ribbon that is wrapped up and wrapped around inside of this printer cartridge.
So eventually, after this printer ribbon rotates a number of times through the system, we tend to see that the information on the page gets lighter and lighter as we lose more and more ink. This will be very clear when you’re looking at the output of the printer, that it becomes very difficult to read, and so it’s time to replace the entire printer cartridge.
Fortunately, these are designed to be pretty modular. They usually will pop right out of the printer. You can push the new one directly in place and immediately start using it. And you’ll find that replacing this ribbon cartridge inside of a dot matrix printer is a process that usually takes less than a minute.
The print head itself is also something that you will occasionally need to swap out. This is a mechanical device, and it has these tiny pins on the print head. And occasionally, one or more of these pins will eventually stop working. You do want to be careful when replacing the print head, especially if the printer has recently been used. These print heads tend to get pretty warm, and you’ll notice the back of this print head is really just one big heat sink.
Some dot matrix printers have a few screws that you would remove to be able to take out the print head, but there are other dot matrix printers that have a release lever or a bar that you can use to easily remove the print head without needing to use any tools. And if you’re spending the time to replace the print head, you might also want to take a few extra moments and replace the ribbon cartridge. This means the next time you print on this printer, you’ll have the best possible output from your new print head and your new ribbon cartridge.
Replacing the paper on a dot matrix printer can sometimes be challenging. These dot matrix printers don’t tend to use single pieces of paper. Instead, they’re using one continuously fed piece of paper that has these tractor feed holes on the left and right side. This means that you not only need to align these holes properly, but you have to pay close attention if you’re using a page that has a form printed on it. This is because the printer is going to print onto the spaces of that form, and you have to make sure that it is aligned perfectly inside of that printer.
And of course, you’re not using individual pieces of paper. You’re using one extremely long, continuously fed piece of paper that is being pulled through that printer. So you’ll want to make sure that you don’t have anything that would get in the way of that paper as it’s being fed through the printer.
If you do, the paper will tend to readjust and ultimately jam itself inside of the printer. So make sure that the entire length of the paper being fed into the printer and the paper that is being fed out of the printer is all working without anything that’s in the way or is constraining the entire paper flow.