I don't know if this will ever be common, but it just may save someone the 22 hours it took to find it.
Symptom: Very light on front half of prints and copies, lead to trail.
Solution: Cleaned the grease off the leading edge of each Polygon Mirror.
This copier is upstairs in a building that produces breakfast cereal. The oven vents on the roof and the airconditioning intake is pulling the fumes into the office where the copier is. So, if you have this symptom,in this type of environment, and you've replaced everything, including the kitchen sink, split and inspect the Polygon mirror closely. It took a little over a year for enough film on the mirror to cause the problem.

I use to have to clean the leading edges of certain models of Konica Minolta machines when I worked on them a while ago. Sounds to me that this customer needs to do something about the air conditioning intakes to prevent the fumes from entering the area and being able to contaminate the copier. What does the main charge rollers look like, sooner or later they will probably get contaminated, this could be good for the fuser though, it may act like the fuser oil that use to be used, maybe you will get less fuser jams occuring with this copier.

Thanks for the info - I have one of these that shows a definate fading at the front on graphics but ONLY in thick mode when the machine passes paper at half speed. I'll be sure to give this a try next visit...

Regards,
Mark

Elheather,
My contacts response to his environmental issue was:"I don't want a machine that won't work here." I'm just glad the little S**t doesn't get to make the decisions there.

J.D., Sell them a Duplo machine with 4 different color drum units and teach them how to do color separation layouts, or even sell them 4 Duplo's set up in series. I don't think the Duplo's will have much trouble operating in that environment, heck the extra lube might help.