I've got a CLC3200 (had it around a year now). I own it outright and use it for my small print shop but a year of abuse has meant it could use a little attention. I noticed a few weeks back the rollers started giving off a clicking sound but there didn't seem to be any issues caused from this (though it was occassionally depositting yellow blobs on the page, even shortly after a drum change).

Now I'm all of a sudden get large areas of colour banding - e.g. on a print with mostly blue area I'm getting an inch thick yellow strip on the same position each time. I read a thread here saying that rollers, when done, emit a clicking sound and can also cause colour banding issues...let's just say it rang a bell

My question is this - I know most here run maintenance contracts but has anyone done their own roller change? And if so, where can the relevant parts be sourced? I've got a spare fuser unit if that is the part being referred to?

First isolate if it's a drum issue (most common for us in the case of color bands) or another issue by swapping in the affected color (or the color that is dropping out if the color streak is produced by the absense of another color.) Does doing a full auto gradiation adjustment help at all? If you look in service mode do you have any drums over 180% yeild? (rarely but sometimes if we have one that is really up there and failing we'll get weird results from other drums after the auto grad as well.) (I'm assuming the streak is running in the long 17" direction, right?)

Our fusers often tend to click some from 50,000 to 90,000 11x17's on each. (they're nice and quiet at first, but then tend to develop some noises for about the second half of their life.) This doesn't seem to cause quality issues for us as you describe.

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for your input, helpful as ever I made a mistake in the initial description actually - the page is supposed to be mostly blue, however, it was turning out all olive green apart from the inch strip that was the intended blue (running short-ways). So I knew it was a problem with the yellow - I checked the drum yield and it's only at 69% for the yellow, 34% for the cyan. The yellows always seem to burn up pretty quick - I tend to run pretty heavy stock and the yellow never lasts past 100%, probably only getting half their expected lifespan of 40K pages (but I accept this is due to the heavier stock).

I ran a full gradiation adjustment and it's 80% solved it - there's still slight discoloration in the areas mentioned. edit: I've tried running adjustment again but there's no real improvement over the 1st adjustment. I also ran an internal cleaning cycle too.

Also, could you tell me how to get a reading on the transfer belt and fuser, just for future reference?