NPPP: Laser Fuser of Meh

What good is a tool if you don't know what it can and cannot do?

...and that is how I lost a round of fuser roulette with my laser printer.

I was running self-adhesive polyester through the printer in some test runs for the control panel overlays, and a sheet separated from the liner in the feed, the adhesive on the folded-over corner caught the fuser, and, well, that was that.

"Paper jam in tray 2"

The good and rather unexpected news: Despite other failings, HP is still publishing highly-complete tear-down and service manuals for its consumer printers, and my M277dw was no exception.

The fuser is not a user-replaceable part, and the printer is not designed to be easy to disassemble. It took me almost an hour of work to finally extract the fuser unit. But everything came apart according to the manual, and although the fuser wasn't intended to be disassembled either, it too broke down without fuss. Another half hour of slowly peeling sticky, melted polyester off the roller later, I had it clean.

And, miraculously, after getting everything back together-- the printer still worked perfectly. No damage. Whew.

In any case, lesson learned: From now on I run my adhesive media with a masking tape leader folded over the front edge.

NPPP: Laser Fuser back from Heaven

With the printer fuser repaired, I was able to get a good overlay print onto Papilio white self-adhesive polyester. Setting the print type to 'labels' produced the best result by far.

Then I cold-laminated a protective textured vinyl overlay onto that. It took a few attempts to find a technique that proces a good lamination with no bubbles, but here we are!