For months I’ve been dealing with a wonky wide format scanner (mentioned and illustrated to distressing effect
HERE). It’s been annoying as heck, but I’ve been *mostly* able to get around it by scanning at unnecessarily high rez and then reducing size. Takes forever doing it that way, and recently even that has stopped working adequately. The scanner is designed to be user-unservicable, with the screws you need to undo being expertly hidden behind structures that are no longer movable once the scanner as a whole was snapped together. BRILLIANT. So I’ve been looking online for affordable replacement scanners… of which there aren’t any. There are a couple in the $300 range… and then they suddenly ZOOM up to well over $1200 for some reason.
So, not having any reason not to, I undid what screws I could, jammed the damn thing as far open as I could get it, and as carefully as I could squirted some silicone lubricant onto the accessible gears because why the hell not. Guess what: it worked. Seems the plastic gears might’ve been chattering on each other or some such; with a tiny bit of lube, everything now seems to work just fine.
I’m sure overnight I’ll find out that those plastic gears were made out of a Very Special Polymer that was designed to melt and refuse when hit with silicone, turning the thing into a brick.
I’m sure someone at HP received a bonus for designing a scanner that can’t be opened without badly breaking it.