DesignJet T120 Repair Marton, North Yorkshire
Busy day. After completing the DesignJet T520 repair in Grimsby, had a short trip up to Marton in North Yorkshire. Spectacular journey, which included a trip over the Humber Bridge and through some of the villages of Humberside and North Yorkshire.
This however was surpassed on the journey home when the rout took me through the impressive grounds of Castle Howard. Sometimes being a field service engineer really has its rewards.
Back to the plotter. This was a strange problem and one that I’ve only encountered once before.
The plotter was hanging during the first stage of initialization. It wasn’t even getting o the HP logo. It was then giving a long (3 second) bleep. - This indicated there was potentially an issue with the main PCA.
After chatting to the customer this problem had started after a power outage on the premises.
Working on the premise of a faulty main board the first thing I tried was to replace the encrypter chip – this made absolutely no difference whatsoever as I expected.
Basic fault-finding techniques were employed to pinpoint the failing sub-system, again this didn’t yield any positive results.
After going round and round in circles for about 45 minutes, oh and tearing my hair out. I decided to go back to our company policy and implement our “Total Care Solution” process.
Unfortunately, this call had come through a 3rd party dealer so the “phone triage” had not been carried out to any degree of accuracy.
Therefore, I literally went back to basics and carried out a full service and clean to the machine. This included the service station, the printhead and inks, relubricating the rails. Cleaning the paper sensors. In short, a massive amount of TLC to the machine.
Cleaned and re-seated all the connectors on the main PCA, reconnected the power cord and “voila” the machine booted up fully.
Loaded the media and carried out the printhead maintenance. Switched the machine off and replaced the covers. Carried out a full clean to the outside of the machine tried it again…. it worked like a charm.
At this stage I was mighty confused. Although the DesignJet was now working and has been since there was no logic to it. The problem occurring during “stage one” of initialization – the electronics. No sub-systems were being accessed at this stage.
It hadn’t even read the FirmWare yet – No HP Logo. The logo appears just after the FirmWare is read and prior to the sub-systems being initialized. So why did it suddenly start to work?
The machine was rebooted several times to check functionality. Then the customer successfully printed several A1 drawings.
Anyway, in summary, I’ve no real ideal why the machine suddenly kicked back into life. My only thought is the power outage was a red herring and the printer had the boot problem before the power failure happened. (Customer never switches the plotter off)
By servicing and cleaning the machine and reseating all the contact on the main board, this issue was cleared.
It may have been some aerosol contamination on one of the connectors preventing a good electrical connection and thus creating the boot problem.
