Let’s see if we can be logical and clear with this one. The printer was printing normally, then it ran out of paper. We put more paper in, get the orange error light, and nothing is printed. Print jobs appear to be sent, the printer comes to life with the sound of gears and motors, nothing is printed. We’ve never encountered this error before.
First recourse was to check the manufacturer’s website for our model and the problem, which proved no help since our problem turned out to be a broken printer – not a maintenance issue.
The short story: there is a mechanism which activates the roller responsible for drawing paper from the tray into the print head. This mechanism is a small plastic arm, that had become dislodged.
Symptom
- Send job to printer
- orange error light
- nothing printed
With the automatic feed dead, the manual feed still works as a backup option. Although it’s no fun feeding it ourselves a sheet at a time.
Troubleshooting
- Running the printer without the paper tray loaded
- we confirm that the gear that lifts the paper tray works
- we confirm that first two rollers spin, moving paper upwards
- the third roller doesn’t spin
Repair
We had to remove the left side cover, then the motor for the second roller, to reveal how the gear for the third roller was not connected to anything.
- Removing the left side cover required no unscrewing
- take out the paper tray
- open the front (toner access) panel
- open the rear (direct feed) panel
- disengage the tabs holding the cover in place (two at the front and one at the back)
- slide the left side cover downwards (and outwards)
With the motor out of the way (it slides off the shaft, held in by a tab), we noted that there was a plastic arm that had come loose off from its pivoting seat. We put it back onto the pivot, Figure 3.
After some trial and error, we deduced that the left end of arm was designed to wedge behind (the brace of) a separate spring-loaded motorised gear, bringing that gear forward into contact with the third roller’s gear. In turn, the roller spins and feeds the paper.
So we pushed the plastic arm into place (clockwise rotation about the pivot), and restored the printer to proper working order. Reassembly required, of course.
We suspect that the plastic arm came off the pivot when we violently pushed the paper tray back into the printer – we’re a hasty lot at times. The springiness of the plastic arm may have caused it to pop off the pivot (from the jolt) instead of rotating on the pivot as it should. Thus, we’ll have to remember to push the paper tray back in gently. We didn’t realise the tray and feeding roller were connected by this kind of physical mechanism.
Afterthoughts
This video (at the 1:08 mark) shows a white plastic arm on a different model printer. It seems Brother included this very same mechanism across different models of their printers. It’s fortunate that this design feature/flaw is widespread, common enough for savvy users to diagnose and help fellow printer owners.