PrinterShelfSlide

Printer Shelf Slide

My HP4100N (duplexing black+white) and HP2605N (color) printers are ancient and damned heavy. The 4100 has two paper drawers, a duplexer, and a heavy toner cartridge - 40 pounds.

In the past, I've slid and manhandled the 4100 onto a roller cart to fix it; I worried about dropping it and breaking it, or dropping it onto my foot and breaking that.

So, I built sliding shelves for the printers, with scrap 2x4s, finish-grade plywood, and two pairs of 26 inch Centerline 100 pound over-travel drawer slides from Rockler.

This photo shows the printer shelves slid back into the 2 foot deep, 4 foot wide Hallowell steel shelf unit. The 2x4 uprights are screwed to the steel shelf through three holes in the steel shelf (note the horizontal row of 1-inch-spaced holes on the front of the shelf, there is also a row down the middle and one down the back).

The three verticals are spaced 19 inches (center-to-center) apart. For these two printers, I could have made the shelves narrower, but someday I may get an even wider "industrial grade" printer. As is, the space underneath is wide enough for a ream of 8.5x11 paper; typically I store a ream of letter and a ream of legal down there.

( Irrelevant: Note that the lower drawer on the 4100N holds A4 ISO paper - I often use that to print documents from European and Asian colleagues. Makes that printer even heavier. Heavier still if I swap in the legal-sized 8.5x14 paper tray. The duplexer in back makes the 4100 printer heavier still. )

Here is the right shelf slid out to the stops. The shelf is 24 inches deep, the Rockler overtravel drawer slides are 26 inches deep, so this opens up a useful gap between the back of the shelf and the file cabinets below. The "captured-ball-bearing"slides are very smooth - I can push and pull the shelf with a finger, fighting inertia but not friction. With the printer removed, I can flip catches on both drawer slides and pull the shelf all the way out.

Barely visible in the back right corner is one of two additional metal shims that hold down the back of the Hallowell metal shelf. Otherwise, the lever action of the printer weight can flip the metal shelf out of its rails.

More visible is my oddball power strip with IEC-60320 C13 "sockets". (C14 is the shape of the power inlet socket on the back of many computers, printers, and AC adapters, C13 is the plug that fits that six-sided socket). The strip is used and was very inexpensive. It has a dandy LED readout that cycles between volts, amps, and power factor; helpful for printer debug.

Cords and ethernet cables feed through a hook attached to the bottom of the Hallowell shelf above, so they don't tangle when sliding back and forth.

My impetus for building this kludge was repairing the HP4100 printer. That started out with foggy edges and a crease down the middle of the printed page, and got worse. Taking the heavy printer apart was difficult.

It turned out that one of the rollers in the thermal fuser was disintegrating - a plastic coating was turning into ribbons of loose plastic. The fuser unit slides out the BACK of the printer, after removing the duplexer and other gizzies. I found a shop in Arizona that sells refurbished fusers. Replacing the fuser was very quick - slide out the printer, pull out the duplexer, then remove and replace the fuser. Less than five minutes, with the slider.