On 12/13/2015 12:37 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
One trick we used back in the day (I used it on my LA50 and also the
decwriter at school someone misdirected a print job to) was to spray a bit
of WD-40 into the ribbon spool.
Hmm, I'll give that a go and see what happens.
Is the VIC 1525 a dot-matrix printer?
Well, it's an impact printer, I guess. AIUI, it just has a single pin
(driven by a single solenoid) which hits the page through the ribbon,
rather than a dot matrix which can do several lines per pass of the head -
it's quite delightfully crude in terms of construction, which is why I have
this sudden urge to make it able to print :-)
Is the ribbon the cloth type
Yes, cloth ribbon. There's no actual direct drive to the ribbon spools;
instead there's a little clutch mechanism on the head and this snags the
ribbon when the head is returning back to the left-hand margin and causes
it to advance.
It doesn't look like there's direct drive to the head in the left-hand
direction either, incidentally; the mechanism can advance the head to the
right, and when it releases, spring tension pulls the head back to the
left-hand margin. Like I said, delightfully crude. :)
If it is printing fine, but the printing is super light, this might
> help.
Well, it *sounds* like the head solenoid is operating - whether it's
operating at 100% strength or travel is hard to tell. I'm wondering if I
might not be able to hold a bit of sacrificial ribbon from something else
in front of the head while it runs a self-test, just to make sure that the
head is doing its job. The ribbon certainly looks very faded, however, so
I think it's done for either way.
Good luck!
Thanks!
Jules
