A Digital Printing Network
Repairing and buying misc parts online
I have seen and thought for myself of shopping around for spare parts for the Roland SP-300i which our company has invested. Seeing how much it costs to call in a technician for every issue we have is just not a smart move from a business point of view. I'd just like to hear everyone's discussions and views on this about repairing and replacing parts which needs to be done by a technician...
Just to point out my view on this... calling in a technician to 'fix-on-the-spot' for most issues is cost effective and profitable if the techncian was available on the day. If the job was needed ASAP i would be thinking about alternative methods to get around the issue if I cannot fix the problem myself which requires a trained technician on site. At most times I have 2nd and 3rd review of fixing an issue myself which may require some simple knowledge of the process and the necessary tools to fix an issue without voiding my warranty.
I also see it to be a pain sometimes when techncians charge ridiculous prices for parts which can get online for almost nothing...
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Kathy MacMannis on -
Daniel, I guess my first question would be how many and how often are you having problems, and why???? If your machine is still under warranty it can't be that old so what is going on? Knock on wood I've had my machine now for 18 months and other than today's disaster, which I just posted about, I've had nothing that hasn't been able to be handled by a phone call to tech support. What spare parts do you think that you would need? Just curious/
Kathy Mac
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Permalink Reply by DanielTF3 on -
Kathy, it seems now we had our SP300i for about the same 18 months now... However our problem is that we weren't using the printer as often as we needed. Lots of reasons to point out why we were not determined to not spend time on the new machine we invested in. One of the reasons i'll point out is that we didn't have a starting point and the ground knowledge to build the printer into our cost structure for what it can really do for us in terms of making money. We had recently also invested into a program which helps us accurately price our goods which meant that we had to have a cost structure for putting a price tag on items which we were decorating on. We ceterainly learned about 6 months ago that the printer was needed to be running every week to prevent crap building up in our print heads. Second issue was, we didn't have Corel X5 therefore I was left to develop colour profiles manually unlike X5 which already had the colour profiles for versaworks. Putting all the above aside... our company is working to a very close timeline, therefore re-visiting the manual and service booklet was out of priority. about 2 months ago we had a technician come in to calibrate and clean-up the print heads which weren't firing properly causing CMYK to print out with missing bars in the test prints.
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Permalink Reply by DanielTF3 on
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Carefully observing our technician, he repaced cap wipers and tubes which connected the print heads to the ink cartridges, those parts i believe you can get off ebay for almost nothing... After some calibrating and adjusting to our print head we had been charged a fee which i saw to be a bit of waste which could have been used to buy more ink for future jobs when our current ink runs out. Simple things i saw to be something which I can learn by watching videos online was not an option after a discussion with my MD. I agree with my MD as time is our worst enemy for our business. Another issue which our technician said to us was that we were past the service date for 6month service which was part of the warranty provided by our seller. Since our problems has been fixed with an update with X5 and calibrating with a technician coming in, our printer is now running about 2-6hrs/ week.
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