As I stood in my little workshop, waiting for glue to set on the fake Crocs from which the puppy removed significant portions, I noticed the laser portion of my printer dissection. I assumed it would need to be broken open, but now picked it up and saw it had four little plastic tabs – piece of cake!
And very cool! The laser is at the arrow on the right. The hexagonal disk has mirrored edges, and is attached to a motor. The bizarrely-shaped plastic lens is obviously very carefully designed to very precisely deliver incredibly tiny dots at incredibly high speed. The arrow on the left points to a tiny mirror whose purpose remains a mystery to me. Amazing technology.
The plastic bits on the right represent a slightly less amazing technology. I was unable to plug in a Schuko plug to an adaptor (maybe the very one labelled C in this post from 2012). I thought I’d take it apart, which it turns out involved breaking it, but the stuck safety gate shown here dropped out. So I glued the broken parts back together, and voilà – another silly little project done.
How brilliant to be techy. Perhaps you take it for granted by now, but it’s really something to be envied.
My father was an engineer. I was always “the artist,” drawing in 2-point perspective at age 5, and now comfortably retired after a series of self-published how-to-draw kids’ books that have sold many millions of copies. But actually doing things methodically is a skill (or maybe it’s just patience) I’ve only built over the years.
Agree with Savyra … truly fascinating! love
Best I can figure that mirror has to spin 500,000 times per SECOND in in order to produce a printed page in 10 seconds. Hard to imagine how that’s even possible, but I spin that thing next to my ear and hear absolutely nothing! The replacement printer ($90 here; $50 in non-socialist-“paradise” countries) is smaller, with toner cartridge half the size, and cranks out pages twice as fast.