This is probably old news to many of you, but I found out some interesting information concerning printer jams last week.

We have five printers in my office, two of them pretty high-end color laser printers, the others just regular black and white workhorses. (The Kyocera is well on its way to the million page mark now...)

In recent weeks, we've been experiencing printer jams on printers that normally just don't do that. The Kyocera, in particular, would run for months and tens of thousands of copies at a time between jams. Suddenly, we were experiencing three, four, even five paper jams a day. The big HP color laser printer jammed so badly we had to call the repair service to come in and take it apart.

I asked the repairman what was going on, and he said, "Watch this." He took a half-inch stack of paper out of the feed tray and laid it on a flat desktop. "Now, crouch down and sight along the edge of the desk," he said. And lo and behold, that stack was curled up slightly at each end -- no more than a millimeter or two. "That's enough to cause printer jams," he said.

He told us how paper comes from the paper mill in huge rolls. The high-end paper comes off the outside of the roll where the curvature is minimal. The cheap stuff comes off closer to the hub, where the curvature is greater.

We called the office supply store to come and take their cheap paper back and replaced it with our normal paper (they had been out of that paper before, which is how we got stuck with the cheap stuff in the first place) and there has not been a single printer jam anywhere in the building since.

The service call cost us $100, which in my mind was money well spent.

tanstaafl.