HP printer repairs

Gamble Bay Timber’s “HP All-In-One printer” (Series 7400) failed to scan a document. The display indicated the scanner door was open when it was closed and indicated it was closed when the door was open.

Eventually I was able to pop the side covers off the scanning door which is on top of the unit. The covers did not break and did unsnap, amazingly. Inside I noticed the cable harness coming from the lower unit on the rear left. I was able to unplug this cable connector from the top door electronics and then proceeded to remove the back cover allowing me to unsnap the connector from the main body electronics. I was then able to remove this 23 inch cable and observed 3 broken wires where the cable bends routinely each time the door opens.





I further observed the 10 wire cable was secured by tie wraps which were extremely tight. I believe the tight tie wraps contributed to the failure. All the wire bending was at the tie wrap and all the insulation on all the wires were broken at this point. The 3 wire breaks were here also. This printer was purchased in 2006 so is 4 years old.

After some thought I simply soldered the wires together at the break and removed the tie wraps. I also removed a spiral wire protection where the cable bends as the cover is lifted. This gives the wires much more flexibility and the bend radius is increased now.

The printer now is working like new. Later I found out, I could have purchased the whole cover assembly electronics and paper feeding mechanism along with a new cable for $25 from HP. The cable was not sold by itself. Regardless this fix may last longer that the original due to the slight modification.

Our home HP OfficeJet Pro printer (L7555) failed to scan documents but in a different failure mechanism. It would scan the document but fail to place the file on the computers hard drive. Apparently this is a repeating problem either for Vista users or Vista 64 users which is what we have. Finally I found the workaround was to create an icon on the computer which starts up the correct scanning software on the computer and now I start the scan from the computer. I can now locate the scanned document file on the hard drive. I can live with that. I just placed a little note on the printers scan button to direct us to the computers scanning software.