Hi welcome to Tear Down! Tuesday Why am I sitting on a big orange sheet with a photocopier? Well, this is the puppy we're going to tear down today all 80 kilos or 180b of it. Why? Because we can. and if you've been following my tweets, you'll know that I Found this thing in the garbage room. It was dumped in one of the uh uh bins one of the big bins there.

but um, got it out and I don't think it's working I don't care I scored another one actually from the same garbage room that does actually work. but they toss this thing out. It's a Panasonic DP 2310 and it should be fun. It should be.

Lots of interesting stuff in here, So you know what we say here on the EV blog: don't turn it on, take it apart and as I said, it's a Panasonic DP 2310 and I powered it up here and uh, it does actually work. It's got one of these touch screen uh displays, but in unfortunately, you know it's no good. It's missing all of the side panels and the trays and the whole lot. they were just missing and all sorts of stuff so it's really no good to keep.

but we're going to tear the sucker down. And apparently this was like a really topof the range. uh, mono. It's not a color mono.

uh, photoc copia. networked photoc copia. you know, probably 10 years ago or so collating things on the side or whatever you call it. and I just checked the user manual.

It does seem to be about a 2003 vintage, so it's bordering on you know, 9 or 10 years old or thereabouts and you know all sorts of things are missing the side stuff and the paper collator on here although the paper can actually come out from here. but all the cover plates and the trays, it's all gone. So it it should be. um, an interesting tear down because these photo copies are great.

if you can get your hands on one should have lots of cool Motors and sensors and all sorts of other gear that you can reuse for hacking projects. and this could get a little bit messy hence the orange uh cover sheet here. So I don't get all the black toner on the carpet cuz I you know it's already all over the damn thing and you know I don't I think it's going to be really messy when we start tearing this sucker down, but well, let's go. could take a few hours.

I Expect this to be pretty complex if we have a look at the counter there. it's only a six-digit one, but it shows 13674 copies. I Don't know if it's rolled over, but uh, if that's the case, that's actually not many and that's not much. um for a huge copier like this one and as you can see, there's the trays where the trays go down in there.

it's actually um, higher than this. It's got extra trays which go on the bottom and but there they were missing from the whole thing. And there's the Honer. and I will try my best to sort of document the tear down of this thing.

but there's bound to be so many things involved in this. I It would need hours and hours of video to cover them all. There's part of the exposed drum down in there. There has lots of black toner all over the place, but this is, uh, what she looks like.

There's a uh, metal box on the back which presumably contains P power supply Electronics cable going up to the top. uh, head there. and that's the model number of the uh of the like. the sheet feeder, um, head scanner head on the top and there's the USB and 100 Bas T ethernet interface.

It's also got a flash memory card interface and if you believe the rumors, these photocopiers are supposed to have hard drives in them. that, uh, store every document ever scanned. so be interesting to see. We find a hard drive in the sucker.

One interesting thing I found is this you want? If you're wondering what it is, there's a matching one over here, which might explain it. Here we go. Can we get that? Yeah, there we go. It locks in place like that.

What are they? They're carry handles. It's got one on the other side as well cuz this thing is so darn heavy you need these to pick the thing up. All right. That was pretty easy.

We took the top scanner part off and we' got a look at our first board here. These two uh uh, plunges here go down to presumably go down to micro switch which detect um, when the cover is actually closed. Why it needs two like that? Um, my first guess would be so that when you have, uh, you know, some sort of book in there you scanning a book, it's got two different L levels of uh, you know, two different levels of detection so the first one would detect. okay, you've got that down there.

the next one detect flatter ones I don't know that would be my guess. Um, we got a rather interesting single in line uh, device power device here. probably some sort of I don't know, driving some sort of motor or something like that with a whole bunch of look at that? that's a massive bundle of cable coming out of there. that's just abs.

Absolutely enormous and well, yeah, I guess we can get that board out there. We go. It's an SLA 7042 I Don't know I haven't got time to check now. This little gear here is interesting.

If I turn it, you can see the scanner plate move across like that. There you go. So that's um I Don't know whether or not that's that could be controlled by the board here because there's a couple of cables coming over here. There's another cable going off over here to some sensor over here which I think detects when there.

This sensor here probably detects when this is all the way back in line with there, so that would be my guess. So this board probably uh, is sort of like a motor controller or something like that for the uh scanner head. And here's what we're interested. This cover plate just folds down like that and Tada look inside of it.

There's two huge boards there with massive BGA device there. another huge BGA device up here. Lots of stuff happening in there. We'll take a good look at those uh boards later.

but uh, that's very, very exciting. I like it and uh, it's obviously designed for Access because they've got this nice little, uh, nice little retainer here. I like it. and clearly this top board is like a PC um, some sort of Intel PC architecture.

We've got a PCI slot here. We've got a dim memory module up here. we've got the ethernet and USB and compact flash. We've got more memory.

Got some custom sockets around here which look a bit unusual, but it's You know, it's a custom design board, but uh, it's clearly some sort of uh PC architecture. and if we take a look at the bottom board down here, it is clearly uh, one of the main controller if not the well, the main controller for the motors and the sensors hasn't got direct motor drive on it. You can tell by the lack of Uh Power stuff. there's a couple of power resistors down here, but nothing much doing on there.

but look at all the cable harnesses everywhere going off, snaking their way through these to, um, probably lots of a ton of probably a dozen separate boards as we've already seen on the uh top, there probably individual motor, driver, and sensor boards all coming back to this main controller here. Now taking this plate off is rather interesting. Look at this. It's like a big some sort of big flywheel or something like that's um, obviously the paper.

I think that's the paper mechanism so that's like I you know I don't know the mechanics of it all, but I can feel that that is sort of linked through to the paper handling uh, stuff on here in the drum and stuff like that. This is clearly the motor which is actually a PCB mounted motor. If we take a a closer look at that one, there it is, it's it's actually looks like PC mounted motor and you can see the tracers in there. We'll take a better look at that later, but that's rather interesting.

And then we have some uh, fans up here. Just a couple of fans in there. they're filthy dirty with. look at that.

That's just that's why I've got the drop sheet here and the toner. It's just filled with toner. One angled fan out there. um, up there like that's probably taking uh, the heat out of the uh, it looks like the top scanning plate or something like that.

um, and this one I Don't know. maybe the fuser or something like that gets hot. So um, yeah, it's a mess though. And here's this: PCB mounted motor I was telling you about.

there's another Uh controller in that sill package the SLA 6024 and hey, made in China from Japanese and foreign components. and look at that. There we go. it's Look at that excellent worm drive on the back there.

it's brilliant and that goes through there and dries those cogs in there, which are presumably like, as I said, part of the paper handling mechanism or something like that. We got a controller on the back here. Beautiful. I Like it.

And here's our: IEC Main's input filter as you can see: big choke, big common mode choke. there couple of filter caps, couple of Ms and uh, that's about it. fuse which might be a little high rupture capacity one or something like that, but yeah, not much doing there. and down under here we have some little teeny tiny Motors check out the wires going to them extremely thin.

therefore the uh paper Drive mechanism. uh for the tray. clearly cuz they go into little cogs in there on the one of the Uh paper Drive uh, one of the paper cassette things sorry, one of the so they they're what drag the paper out of the tray up into the main mechanism on the back here, past the drum there and you know and then Through The copier through the fuser and all that sort of stuff to give you your final print. there some nice little Motors there and this board's rather interesting.

it's uh kind of like the controller for the motors we just saw. uh they go into there but uh it's very old school single sided through whole Parts jumper links the the whole show. Now the thing that starting to impress me already and should be impressing you is just the sheer amount of systems engineering that's gone into producing one of these things. and we've barely even tore this thing down at all.

Just all the just all the metal brackets and the parts and all you know. Imagine the design team having to put together all this stuff. it's it's just, you know. Absolutely incredible.

let alone all the paper handling mechanisms we haven't even got into yet. All the drives and everything. I It must be a massive design effort to uh to to produce one of these photocopiers. I I I Haven't got a clue how big the team would be, but it would be massive I mean just designing this neat mechanism for the pull out handle here that locks into place.

They got all the springs and the moving part parts and the brackets and the A. Unbelievable. And this board here is clearly a high voltage. uh.

board two did giveaways all of the uh Transformers on there and the warning symbols. High Voltage warning symbols. so that's used to high generate the high voltage that's required to actually pick up the uh toner cuz that's how I believe these things work. They generate a really high electrostatic, uh voltage and then the toner clings to the drum.

um as it, uh as it passes over. so um, clearly that is some sort of board which generates I'm not sure what order of voltages if anyone knows, let me know. and once again, they've done that. uh, cheapest chips, single sided? um, they' all be custom Transformers of course, all through whole Parts with the links and uh, very, you know, Spartan sort of layout.

but um, it does make it uh, cheap, makes it very reparable. and I guess you're not um, really, uh, constrained for room inside these photocopies. They're really big devices, but you know all these things have to mount on custom brackets. Ah, it's just crazy and we have three more Motors in there driving the paper handling over the drum and over the back here cuz normally this would have a back panel on it and of course you saw the motors down there before which pick up the paper from the paper cassette and then it feeds it up through here and these three motors in there handle all that aspect.

and then you've got the big Drive in there. If you can see that that's a, there's some monster gears and drive mechanisms inside there that' be to, uh, turn the drum. Um, and the rest of the mechanism which feeds the paper. Through The copier.

But jeez, these things are complex. Let me tell you there, just the sheer amount of Engineering in these is phenomenal. Now one of the things I find really fascinating is the cable harness in here. I've got these two fans here and these are connected through to this harness which goes down through here, but it also goes up to something else up on the top board up here as well that we looked at right at the start, but it it comes down through here which comes into this connector which went into one of you know which went into our main controller board down the bottom but then that also branches off.

It's not even separate, it branches off to something else way down in the bottom down there. Maybe there's more fans down in, you know, inside there and this is like the fan harness or you know, something like that, but it's just. it's just incredible. the amount of effort which has gone into just doing these cable harnesses, getting them all correct, and there's some obviously some procedure to assemble this whole damn thing cuz it's not obvious when you take it apart without like a stepbystep disassembly guide.

Now this is interesting. We can see from the drum there all these sprogs and mechanisms in here. this has got some sort of sensor cable coming out of it. Clearly, that's not a motor and these ones down here we looked at before.

we can actually get the label on that now and that's from the something or other clutch company. So I don't know. Are these some sort of clutch mechanism? I'm not quite sure. Uh, if they're Motors or they're some sort of, uh, clutch thing with a sensor.

um, because the wires are very very puny coming out of them. Um, so it looks. yeah, they very very loose. So thinking it's some sort of don't actually think it's a motor, probably just some sort of Clutch And here we go.

These little uh, clutch mechanisms just pull off the shafts here when you take the retaining clip off the back. So let's uh, let's take a look at one of these things. There it is. Ogura Clutch Co made in China Um, but there you go.

DC 24 volts and uh, that spins very freely it. uh, so it'll be interesting to, uh, check out what these things actually do. Well, check this out. This is one complex Drive mechanism.

This is for all, most probably the majority of the good, majority of the paper handling. certainly the paper pickup and uh, passing over the drum and uh, stuff like that. Just the engineering go goes into systems engineering goes into getting all this right. All the cogs down in there.

it's crazy. You can see them all. They're all. they're all staggered.

They're not just, you know, they're the angled um, cogs. and just, ah, just just imagine designing that mechanism on its own. Crazy. Even this cute little mechanism here, which is covered in toner.

It's got uh, for six, uh, cogs in there. Yeah, you know it obviously connects various things together. Yeah, somebody probably spent you a month getting that right? Okay, what we have down in this paper bottom, paper handling or paper feed mechanism I Guess you could call it where the paper first comes up from the tray. Um, it looks like it's got a sensor here.

and that's like a probably a paper jam or a paper paper position sensor. There looks like two there going off off to these cable harnesses. and that's you know, where you often have to, uh, unjam your paper. They can get caught and jammed up and gunged up in here and not fun at all.

Anyway, if you're not aware of the basic mechanism of a photocopy, I'll just run through it. Uh, R you know, as a Rough Guide It basically uh Motors extract a piece of paper from the uh tray down the bottom. Here it comes through the feeder mechanis M and it passes by the drum here. and the drum contains a Um coating of toner on it put there by the What's called the Corona wire and that's a high voltage wire which electrostatically coats the drum with the tone of material and the paper passes by that and it's exposed via the light in the mirror, you see that big light.

Uh, come on, when you open the photocopier and if if we move the wheel here it is, there's the tube. Okay, there's the there's the light tube in there and it's got mirrors. which actually you'll notice that the mirrors are these triangle mechanisms in here are actually mirrors and they direct the light down onto the toner sorry, onto the Uh drum which the paper is passing over and that will um and then that will coat the Uh paper with the toner material where it's exposed and then it goes up into the fuser up here and not sure if you can, you might be able to see the fuser rollers in there. They're basically high temperature rollers that um fuse hence the name fuser that fuse the toner onto the paper.

That's why your paper comes out hot and that's why they've got caution: high temperature on here because you don't want to go touching the fuser in there and then the mechanism pushes the paper out and shoots it directly out and that's pretty much all there is to the operation of photocopy. So in concept they're not that hard. but the mechanics and the engineering of actually getting them right. um, you know, to a high degree of precision.

A high degree of reliability is incredibly complex from a systems engineering point of view. As we're seeing here, now, you're probably wondering about the drum itself and why it's green, Why it looks, you know it's Co. They always have a very similar look. It's actually uh, coated with a semiconductor material, just like they make silicon chips out of, but it's probably a selenium instead of a silicon or a geranium.

but uh, it. Basically, you can use, um, any one of the different types of semiconductor materials to coat the drum with. And there's our big beefy cables and uh connectors going into our fuser there. Cuz these these things take a lot of energy to, uh, heat these suckers up.

Now it's interesting to note up in this section here, they've actually got connectors going through this wall here so that it looks like we can just pull out this entire mechanism here. and uh, so it all assembles whereas most other uh cables, uh, don't bother having like a penetrator connector going through like that. but they have done it here because they deem that's all part of the assembly or disassembly uh process. And here's the main paper handling mechanism, which uh contains some feed uh, drives and things like that coming from the motors and the mechanisms we saw earlier.

and uh, it contains the fuser as well. that uh Heats it all up. So and this is where the paper eventually comes through and there's a couple of uh, once again, there's I think there's a couple of sensors down here. paper stuck sensors.

Now let's see if we can explain the travel path the paper comes in through here. this, uh, past the drum. Of course it's already gone past the drum and it comes into here which then goes down which then goes F through the fuser, rollers down in there, which uh, will fuse the image onto the paper. Then there's these rollers and mechanisms in there.

There's some sort of paper guide mechanism and you've probably that's why they put this on here cuz this is where paper jams. Of course they've got the big paper jam point and this is where you're You know you want to kick the photo copier and just beat the living crap out of it like in uh, the Office the movie. if you haven't watched it. Fantastic.

and then yeah, it shoots out of there and comes through. Whoop. comes through here and eventually or it goes goes up through there and comes out these rollers here and that's where it shoots out into there it is. There's the exit path there, which then it shoots directly out of there and that's where you see the paper come out.

Magic and this is nice. Look at this. We have an oldfashioned electromagnetic solenoid Look at that, bam, turn on the current and boom it. Uh, latches that in? That's probably some I don't know, some sort of maybe, uh paper Direction mechanism.

Or and yes, I think that solenoid was basically a paper. uh, Direction guide switch. So this is how it does a double-sided copy and this is the exit path here as we saw. But of course there's another path at the top here which can feed the paper into there and then bring it back down so that you can.

you know it, hides it up in there, can flip it and then bring it back down and and you can, uh, print the other side. And if you thought the big clunk and power switch on the side of the unit is actually a real clunk and power switch nut, it's one of these stupid soft switches little wimpy piece of garbage that is. and uh, there's another little sensor board here I'm not actually sure what this one does, let it seems to, hey, look at that, that's a little board there. It's uh, it's got what a Ba 10324 on it and uh, that looks like maybe a little little speaker or something like that.

Not entirely sure what that little board is doing. and down here we obviously have some sort of uh, critical set mechanism because they're done in here with locktite and this has like a little you know, a a position display which rotate. You know you can move that arm up and down and presumably set something I don't know what? some sort of angle of some. And if we take that paper exit tray cover off, you can see various cable harnesses running inside.

We've got some sort of black box maybe that's the uh, uh Power controller for the toner? uh for the fuser? sorry, something like that. Um, yeah, not entirely sure, but uh, not much else doing. There's probably some extra electronics under here, so jeez. I Don't know this has taking a long time, but we're going to have to finish it off like it's uh, quite modular.

There we go. We can actually lift off this entire section. It actually is built in sections and as I said, right at the start, it's actually bigger than this. You can add on more, uh, more paper, uh, cassette stuff down the bottom.

So get this off here. Oh, look at that. Brilliant. Tada and well, it's is certainly a tear down folks.

Let me tell you, there we go, a look at that. and here's one of the complete paper magazine add-ons like you know, the paper drawer. um, slides in there like that. And here's the rollers on top which actually take the paper up and then feed it up through here and then boom up through the side of the photocopier, all the way up and past the drum.

and uh, past the uh fuser. and then out. So that's it. So these are all quite, uh, modular.

Once again, you can get access to paper jams and uh, fixing paper jams and things like that down here. and that would have. There's a there's a sensor for the door closed on it. so you know when the photocopier pops up and says door open, you know door number eight is open.

Well, there it is. And check out all of the Uh cogs and everything that drive all of this. It's really, quite quite complicated. When you get down to it, it's uh, it's a lot of engineering which just goes into making the paper cassette mechanism crazy.

Let's have a look what this thing is. I've undone that. There's couple of wires going into that I'm not sure what. there's a springy thing there I Have no real idea what that that actually is.

Open it up. Hey, there's a moot hey, look at that. Here we go. There's a motor in here and a whole bunch of cogs, which, uh, Drive something or other.

There you go. Man, this thing has more cogs than you can poke a stick at. It's incredible. And check this out.

We have another flip down mechanism and that's definitely the driver board for our fuser. Can tell by the Coloroda Wirs and the huge big beefy power stuff on there. And nothing terribly surprising on here. just a gigantic Scr there on a medium siiz heat sink.

Another device in there, once again, um, single sided. You know there's a few unpopulated things maybe for a the the uh Up Market model photocopy or something, but yeah, single sided Bare Bones few caps, few uh, Opto couplers there, by the looks of it, Scr, and uh, that just uh, drives power to the fuser and we've got a huge Uh switch mode board here and you can see the split primary secondary. We've got the Opto couple is there, the Uh trans, the isolation transformer, and we've got a couple of caps in there for noise switching, noise suppression, and uh, a big Uh 270 Microfarad 400v cap. couple of uh, common mode chokes here, and uh, so I don't exactly know what that's uh, powering, but it's uh, they put a lot of effort into that and it's from Nichon in Japan go figure.

Curiously, we've got a uh, some sort of Choke down here which looks like a, you know, it's in like a uh Transformer type configuration. but it's not a Transformer it's only a, you know, it's only a dual uh uh wire coming out of it. So obviously, um, some form of Choke And here's the top uh user control panel. Nothing surprising here at all.

We've got the main control board. It's got a big quad flat pack there, some memory, another quad flat pack, some miscellaneous circuitry. There's a backlight driver there of course for the LCD um that there' also be an LCD driver on there, presumably another board for some uh switches on the front and switches again. And there's a little popout thing here for the memory backup battery if I can get a damn thing too hard, but it does slide out.

Now this is all rather interesting. This is a very complex sort of arrangement here. this plastic mechanism where there's all the buttons falling out there. but this is a, you know, just that panel alone.

Really, quite a bit of complex engineering has gone into and molding has gone into doing that thing just alone. I mean just the three-dimensional envelope of Designing That front user panel is quite a lot of work, and somebody's gone to the effort to design a PCB that Clips in there just for the LEDs which uh, you know, light up that uh do V hickey on the front, which you know I gives you an indication of what mode the photoc copy is in or something. something like that. but you know it's a bit of a wank.

Factor G to all that effort. Unbelievable. And somebody's had to go into the trouble of uh designing and getting these molded all the buttons so you got to do that in 3D or the button inserts there. And here's the LCD uh module and the touch panel as well.

which goes onto that. It's just a four wire uh interface. so that's the touch panel overlay and that's a big graphic. I'm not graphic display I'm not sure what the resolution of that module is, but uh, you know you could reuse that.

There's a backlight. Neat. You can get good stuff out of photocopies now. I'm very curious to find out what this is because they've gone to a lot of effort to put it on its own bracket.

Like this. it looks like almost looks like there's some sort of motor in there. Something like that. I don't I know, but it's weird.

they've gone to all the effort to uh, hang on I can see something through there anyway as it it's on to the harness here. It's pretty messy, but anyway, let's try and check it out what it is. It's almost as if this thing's like a secret black box or something. It's It's obviously not the secret hard drive we're searching for.

That doesn't make sense at all, but it's It's just really weird. Very strange thing. I Can't get that black plastic off. Aha, it looks like it is the optical scanning device somehow.

so it's motor driven and it obviously uh scans. It's because here's the optical window here and it was strategically placed in there mounted and that's what the it was hooked on to those alignment uh screws which we saw in The copier Before you remember those uh all those screws which are all lined up that was um, aligning this box, aligning this mechanism up like this, which is what allows it to uh, scan? Check this out. They've gone to a lot of trouble to put these plates on here and it's almost as if they're like uh, dampening uh, plates or weights or something like that. So long screws in there, they really don't want the they really want this to be quite a precise mechanism.

I think so. they've got all this rigidity or weight or something to hold it all in place. So I'd say it's very critical. Look all these different plates.

They've got to do what right? They're obviously uh, there to sort of give it some sort of rigidity around this mechanism here, which looks like it's got some sort of uh, motor in there or something like that. So I can only presume that there's some uh laser mechanism in there which is pretty precise and that damps out any vibration or something like that. That's probably what it's for I would suspect it's really difficult to pry. Oh hey, there we go.

Taada. Oh look at that. Beautiful. Wow, this is really something.

Look at this. Theyve it's it is a a Precision uh laser, uh, directional thing. Here's the laser diet over here. We've got our driver board down in there.

That would be our laser driving board we'll probably take a look at. Might have to do a, maybe a separate, uh, tear down and play around with this perhaps. And they've got some sort of lens in there which sort of I don't know, focuses the beam or maybe spreads it or something like that and then yeah, this is a PCB motor and there's looks like there's a is that like a head in some sort of sensor in there you can see it. but anyway, this obviously spins around and uh and directs it out through this uh lens system here and it can scan across the drum like that and create the image on the drum.

Beautiful. So this is how of course it um prints, uh digitally because um, when you uh, print with a normal photocopy. Sure it uses a light and mirrors and it can scan the image directly onto the drum. but when you print from your network, obviously you know you don't have that original image.

you only have it in digital form. So this is how they do it. They scan the laser AC cross the drum like that and it's very it' be very precise Optics cuz you're talking um, 600 dots per inch with great precision and stuff like that. So really it's got to be quite precise.

That's why they had those dampening plates on the bottom of this thing. So oh wow, it's just it's fantastic. I uh um going to have to figure out how to maybe drive this thing and uh I've taken the whole the whole thing to bits now. It would have been quite nice to uh, see it? uh, see it going when you hooked it up to the photocopy.

Electronics But anyway, there's the that's the laser diode mechanism in there. Not sure what type of, uh, what wavelength it is or anything like that, so that's really. I think uh, one of the more more interesting aspects of a photocopier, the laser scanning mechanism to display the image. Brilliant.

Oh, I Could really have some fun hacking this thing. Let me tell you, and you can see the sponge down there and that little arm on it. That's all part of the Uh vibration dampening mechanism I Suspect because any vibration on this thing is really going to, uh, throw it out of Whx. So you got those big heavy dampening plates they've put on there, plus a bit of uh, sponge, and uh, and some sort of little springy bar there, and that all together.

um, mounted on the Uh mounted on that specific arm they put in there. um, they. They would have done their vibration tests on that. You can bet your bottom dollar and uh, that would be quite a stable mechanism, but it's got to work over the entire copier so it's got to.

You know, the the thing sits in here like this and then it's got to shoot out there onto the drum because this thing's mounted parallel with the drum. It's got to shoot out there, so the whole frame has to be rigid and all mounted and engineered properly and calibrated and tweaked. and that's what those uh, tweaks down the bottom. uh.

we saw that adjustment mechanism was for trimming this laser and once again, it's all brilliant. systems engineering, complex stuff in, you know all this complex stuff is in this something like an you use every day like a photocopier and who knew? Okay now let's take a look look at what was inside this mysterious box that was inside the scanning platform. he, hey, what do we got here? What do we got here? We've got another Optical mechanism. Check out that lens.

Beautiful, Absolutely beautiful. And this is clearly the optical scanning mechanism used here because it looks like um, this photocopier. um while on the surface it looks like it has all the optical uh mirrors and stuff like that in the scanning platform to go directly from that and the light go directly to the drum. um I Think it might be entirely uh, digital in that it scans it all through here.

Once again, this is a you know, a different angle. It can um scan the line across as you know it can scan the entire entire line across as the mechanis as that mechanism moves across the paper. like that, an entirely digital path. So it scans it using in this uh mechanism and then it puts it out through the laser to that Optical laser mechanism we saw before to uh, put It onto the drum instead of doing just the direct art light using mirrors.

you know, the old fashion analog technique for photocopies. This is probably all digital, but that is just that is very, very nice. So there's obviously some sort of CCD there. There's a dip sort of package there, so I'm not sure what's what's going on with that, but yeah, probably some sort of uh CCD and I'm not sure how they actually um, scan it across ways like that because there's no you know ability for this thing to move.

It's just fixed with inside the scanning platform and you can see the Precision Alignment screws and the springs on there and the lock tight. They've calibrated this thing to be spot on. Somebody sat there with the right tongue angle and screwed it in place and made sure they got uh, the uh, the alignment that they wanted for this Optical lens mechanism and then they lock tied it down and what we've got here is a high voltage uh driver board which drives the lamp mechanism in here. and of course that lamp mechanism scans across the page like that and you can see how they you know this one travels further than this one down here and there's a geared mechanism in the back there which handles that and CCD uh.

lens mechanism sits in here like this under here and um, somehow scans across that entire line coming reflected from the mirrors in there because you can see the we've got the mirrors along here and here, so it obviously directs it. some sort of advanced Optical mechanism directs it down into the Um CCD sensor down there. Brilliant, Great engineering. I Love these things and what we've got here is a micro switch mechanism which goes down to the uh fuser board and it switches off the fuser when you disconnect.

well. when you, uh, open the back uh thing here, it disconnects so we can just pull the drum mechanism out of here and there's not much in it. There's a couple of little, uh, there's a little wire harness going through there. probably a sensor or something like that.

I'm not sure what's on the end. We've got some rollers and things like that, but apart from that, it's pretty much, um, pretty much just the drum itself. Oh, there we look at that. This is messy business.

let me tell you. oh, this is horrid. Okay, and oh no. Toner is all falling out.

This is bad. All right. Anyway, there are um, rollers and things in there, few cogs and where that drum mechanism came out there. you can see a PCB going all the way along here and as you can see, there's LEDs on there about an inch apart or thereabouts and I believe What they do is they light up obviously? Um, but that's the drum cleaning mechanism cuz you light it up and you can get all the toner, you can clear the toner off the drum before the next operation.

Any excess uh, toner that's happens to be still left on there, electrostatically clinging to the drum head that so, they expose it with light broad light all the way across the entire uh drum. They just flood it with light, spin the drum around and that can clean it, and that's quite a useful little LED light strip in its own right. Well worth stripping out of it. Brilliant.

And I think that's about all she wrote for the photocopier. Tear down. There's not much left. it's pretty much just a shell with a couple of wireing harnesses left and the odd sensor and Cog and things like that.

there's still the little electromagnet electromagnetic counter down there which I'll get out and uh, but apart from that, you know there's a choke down there. but no, it's just a shell left. So I hope you uh, enjoyed that. It's been fascinating.

Look at the amount of screws that I took out of this thing and I'm not even finished. There's got to be another hundred screws left in this thing. That's just ridiculous. And uh, here is the mess.

This is what it looks like after you've torn down a photocopier and this is a real fum tear down look at all the Pcbs we've got left over. We might have to look at those in more detail later, but there's a whole bunch of good great stuff you saw during the video here. and then there's a complete scanning mechanism there. We've got those laser scanner stuff and oh man, you could, really, um, use these things to hack a whole bunch of really interesting and useful stuff.

But yeah, I think it's done. um I don't think see any value in uh, stripping down the rest of the frame? really? cuz we've got all the good stuff out of it. Look at that pile. it's ridiculous.

Woo! That took I don't know a good 3 4 hours. something like that. Quite a bit of effort, but there's lots of cool stuff in these photo copers so if you can pick one up, you can get them next to nothing on eBay people are practically giving them away or I found two in my you know, garbage room down in my building down here. It's crazy.

That's where I got this one from and I'm a mess these things are. They got toner all the way through them. they're horrible. but you can get some great stuff out of these.

The optical mechanisms, scanning mechanisms, the motors, the electronics. brilliant stuff. power supply stuff. high voltage generators.

Fantastic. Anyway, I think I'm going to have to go have a shower clean my screwdriver. It's absolutely filthy and well hope you enjoyed it. That's a photo copier tear down and as always, if you want to discuss it, jump on over to the E blog forum And if you like the video, please give it a big thumbs up cuz that helps a lot.

Catch you next time.