Hi Gang, longtime TechsConnected member directed here by several KM dealers at the last MPS training in Dallas. Sorry my first post is a bit of a doozy!

The TASKalfa 550c (Toshiba e-Studio 5520) in our copy shop went tits up last night, right in the middle of a run. Ledger, single-sided full color, all of a sudden it stopped printing the color portions of the page, but still printed the black. Shortly after, the machine stopped with a CE40 code (color calibration failure.) The machine won't initialize now, always stopping with a CE40 when it tries to do color calibration.

Am going through the troubleshooting (and damn, Toshiba, could you make your service modes any more awkward?) but so far haven't found anything anomalous other than the recorded failures. When you slide the belt unit out, the black patches are recorded, and you can barely see the beginning of the cyan patch, and that's it. The failures are all recorded on cyan, which I suppose makes sense if the order it goes in is KCMY.

Any ideas?

Think we got it, or at least part of it. Following the troubleshooting in the Toshiba manual had us going in circles, so we threw the book out and went back to basics. The black patch was developing on the belt, but only the very beginning of the Cyan, and baaaarely the hint of the beginning of the M, Y patches are visible on the belt. So we thought, hmm, what could cause this? Charge? Possible, but a stretch that all three colors would fail simultaneously, with the K still working. Transfer? Similar story. How about drive? Ah!

Digging deeper, we found that there are separate drives for mag roller and mixing rollers. Well, if the mag roller isn't turning, it'd explain the aborted image developed on the belt. So we took it halfway apart so we could watch it in motion... Ran a calibration, sure enough, K mag roller turns, CMY mag rollers are at a dead stop. Found the correct motor for the CMY mag rollers, it spins suspiciously freely.

So, after pulling out the drum and then the developer drive blocks, we found the gremlin. About a 30 degree segment of the two-tiered CMY developer mag roller drive gear (305JN711M0) is just gone, with a little pile of plastic shreddies in the bottom of the drive block.

So, we're ordering three of the gears to have on hand, at $38 a pop (God bless the middleman), and now I'm seriously reconsidering if I want to be selling these models. Only 180k on the meter, machine is just a couple months old, and it's eating drive gears? Is this common on these Toshiba color engines? O_o I do remember our Panasonic DP-7240/8540 (Toshiba e-Studio 720/850) were really buggy and were parts hogs... Is it the same story on the color boxes as well?

Do you still have one of the gears in stock? Ron
1-586-778-7440

had a few 650c out and they ran ok till they got about 300k on them and then the bottom fell out. It was one problem after another, service codes and a never ending parts and PM replacement. kyocera never seemed to have the parts in stock and some they just can't seem to get. big account so we are in the process of replaceing the machine with the new line of kyocera. good luck getting parts you may try a toshiba dealer for parts thats what we had to do to keep machine running

Did you compare the copy quality between the
new task alfa and the 550c ?
the 550c is by far better copy quality
and we are in the same boat try to update
but the user will not accept the quality of the new kma

quote:

Originally posted by flyer:
had a few 650c out and they ran ok till they got about 300k on them and then the bottom fell out. It was one problem after another, service codes and a never ending parts and PM replacement. kyocera never seemed to have the parts in stock and some they just can't seem to get. big account so we are in the process of replaceing the machine with the new line of kyocera. good luck getting parts you may try a toshiba dealer for parts thats what we had to do to keep machine running

We've had continual parts issues too; however, it's not totally Kyocera's fault. When we were unable to get anything I started calling Toshiba dealers and they were left high and dry as well. It seems Toshiba had (has?) some pretty major supply-line problems and even first-line Toshiba dealers were months behind on backordered PM parts and supplies.

I will say that the output on the 550c is a little better than on the 5550ci or the 7550ci, when everything is working as it should. However, our 550c now has over a million clicks on it, and image quality is all over the place. We even started from ground zero, doing a full inside-out PM with all the scheduled PM parts as well as a full load of fresh developers (and boy are they ever proud of those!), and PCQ still fluctuates all over the place. What a piece of crap.

I'll freely admit that the 5550ci and 7550ci aren't quite as sharp and the fill isn't quite as rich as the 550c, but at least so far they are much more consistent (and don't need a four-hour PM every 250k!)

quote:

Originally posted by fixitright:
Do you still have one of the gears in stock? Ron
1-586-778-7440

And sorry, don't have any spare gears. The number is 305JN711M0 if you want to order one to have on hand (I certainly would. Since my original post last year, we have now replaced this gear two more times!)

I agree that the parts problems are not all kyocera fault, but that dose not matter to a customer who has 500 multipage full color saddle stich bullitens to get out every week not to mention the other thing they have to print. all they want is thier machine to work. they have a couple of 400 and 500ci at this account and some bw machines. One of the complaints was that the color matched what they had selected from thier program on the 400 and 500ci closer than the 650c. put a 6550ci inplace of the 650c and so far they seem to like it and the colors match the other ci. the fill may be a little les but the shade and hue match the pc image and this is what they want.