Xerox Phaser 6110 Banding Cure

As usual, my Phaser 6110N (light use, home office network duty, printed less than 2000 pages in the 4 years or so I've had it) developed a banding issue. Rather than invest in a new toner unit, I decided to take it apart and have a look at it. What I discovered is the toner feed mechanism was clogging up and not distributing toner to the imaging drum.

This is a messy job, I did it in the bathtub (dry of course!), and it's simply a case of removing the side covers from the imaging unit (I'd recommend putting the drum in a thick black plastic bag to prevent overexposure) taking care not to lose any parts, and sliding the toner feeders out of the unit. You can then remove the top cover and it will allow you to clean out the mechanism with a small dry paintbrush.

Remove just enough to de-clog the mechanism, and especially the feed conveyor at the back - this takes toner from the cartridge and feeds to the roller screws that feed the imaging drum.

If you've only got banding problems with one colour, only de-clog that particular colour. It's messy and no point wasting expensive toner! Black and red where problems for me, in both cases the conveyor mechanism was chock full of toner and there was very little in the feeder roller screws.

Re-assemble the imaging unit and run a couple of test patterns through the printer. You'll probably find that the first few pages are especially faint - when you first power up the printer from new, it fills the feed mechanisms from the toner cartridge, I haven't found a way to make it do this again (maybe someone can hack together a maintainence firmware update?). The more you emptied from the feeder, the longer it'll take to even it up. Once it's got the page mostly covered, you're back in business.

After I'd done all this, my banding problem went away! Of course, the bath was covered in toner dust and it took a while to get rid of it all!