How to Troubleshoot a Recurring Printer Jam

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Eric White and we're going to talk about how to trouble shoot a recurring paper jam in a printer. So, you're printing a job, the papers are coming out, and they're getting jammed up inside, and then the print job errors out and you were away at lunch or something, expected it to be done when you got back, and here we are. A pile of paper and a stopped printer. First thing you're going to want to do is open the top of the printer and clear all the paper from the printer completely. There should be no paper in here whatsoever. Under no circumstances should you ever put a pair of pliers or a screw driver inside the printer. Just do the best you can at looking around at what's going on in there. There's rollers. What happens is when you do a print job, the rollers pick the paper up and roll it into the printer and then prints it, and then it rolls out into the feed tray. Sometimes paper can get torn and caught on those rollers, so you gotta do the best you can. Look inside and look at all the different rollers. Now, on a small printer like this one, the rollers don't really move around, they don't pop up, they don't move too much. On a large, industrial printer or copy machine, you can go in there and flip a lever and release the roller and you can really get a lot out in those kind of printers. So basically you can flip the tray up, take a look inside, see if there's any paper. Many times where it's going to jam is when it feeds into the machine, before it even gets to the print heads. Once you see that you've cleared the rollers and the printer of any obstructions, check your paper out before you go back in. You know, flip the paper around, make sure there's no bends or creases in it. Sometimes static can hold the sheets together and the paper's too thick to go through and that jams it. Once you've made certain that none of that is happening, just load the printer back up full of paper and start your job again. That's all you need to know to troubleshoot a recurring printer jam."