Drum Life Ends soon - Brother

My MFC-7420 began to display the message "Drum end soon" so I quickly went out and purchased a new drum. But I decided not to install it until I needed to. Because what does "drum end soon" mean? I thought it would mean that the print quality would deteriorate enough that I would notice the problem. So I continued to replace toner as needed, and pushed the blue cleaning thing down the wire regularly. This went on for over 3 years until *finally* I started having regular print job production problems. I replaced the drum, and the problems were solved. So,my advice is be prepared, but don't replace the drum until you have to -- the message means very little.

Are you sure of the error message? The Brother printers that I have used have Drum Ends Soon and Change Belt messages.

The Brother MFC-9440CN has a belt that can be replaced. The Belt unit has an life expectancy of ~50000 pages. The belt unit is part BU100CL and costs a bit over $150 at office supply stores. Amazon.com and some other stores have the unit for under $100. http://www.amazon.com/Brother-BU-100CL-HL-4040CN-HL-4070CDW-Series/dp/B000SC245E is one source.

When the unit says Change Belt Unit, follow the directions from the manual's maintenance section to replace the belt unit. See page 178 (page 189 of the PDF) http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/BSC/public/files/dlf/doc002252/mfc9440_usa_usr_b.pdf . You have to remove the Drum and then the Belt Unit. Then slide in the new Belt Unit and replace the Drum unit. Then close the printer and turn it on. Finally reset the counter from the Machine Info sub menu (press Menu 8 4 and select the Belt Unit and press OK. Then press 1 followed by Stop/Exit).

If you mean the Drum Unit, that is part DR-110CL and costs over $175 at the office supply stores. Order this part when the Drum End Soon message appears and replace it if the print quality deteriorates (or when you have the new drum). The Drum Life is ~17000 pages. The steps start on page 166 (182 of the PDF). You need to remove the old Drum unit. Then remove the toner cartridges from the drum. Prepare the new Drum Unit, including putting the cartridges in the new Drum. Then replace the Drum unit and reset the counter.

I hope this helps.

Cindy Wells

I got this same error message on a newly acquired Brother DCP-7040 that I purchased used off of ebay.

As I was troubleshooting this unit (that I bought untested off of ebay - hey gambling has paid off handsomely for me many times before!), this error message kept popping up.

I checked the COUNTERS (page & Drum life) and found out that the DRUM had 0% life left. BUT, the reason it showed ZERO was because this unit did not have any drum! The toner cartridge (TN-360) needs to sit WITHIN the drum (DR-360) on this DCP-7040 unit, as well as in models DCP-7030, MFC-7340, MFC-7345C, and MFC-7440N.

So perhaps some of these "put the black toner cartridge back in" problems could be related to the DRUM (or lack thereof). A possible tipoff (since the toner cartridge actually does slide into the unit much like other units that do not use Brother's DRUM carrier) seems to be the relative ease with which the toner cartridge slides into the DCP-7040 and really doesn't seem to "lock" into position real firmly.

DCP-7040 USER GUIDES: http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public/us/us/en/doc/manual_index.html?reg=us&type2=-1&prod=dcp7040_us_as&c=us&lang=en&flang=all

each replacable part has its own life of rotation, heat conversion ect. may be the life cycle of the drum reached to end. you need to replace the drum assembly.

I tried everything and then decided to slightly change the above instructions to:

Open the front cover
press Clear/Back
Replace New Drum - select "Yes"
after the screen will show "accepted"
close the front cover and you are good to go

and WA LA it worked!!

Open the front cover and press clear/back buttom
then press start
finally, press 00, then the screen will show accepted.

after that, you will be good to go.

If you have the manual follow the steps for trouble shooting.
It will tell you to remove the drum, remove toner, clean corona wire and reinstall. If that does not solve the issue it will recomend replacing the drum. You can check your drum life by going to menu- press machine info, choose option 3 drum life and press ok. This will show you the remaining percentage of your drum if the number shows less than 25% replace the unit.
If it shows more than 50% you can reset the drum counter allowing the machine to read it as a new unit.( Bare in mind this will change the usage meter back to 100%, you will have to keep an eye out for print defects or light pages as this will signal the end of the drum life) to reset page counter remove the drum from the machine, with the front door open press Clear/back until the lcd displays reset drum yes? no? press 1 for yes and reinstall drum. The machine will cycle until ready; if this still has not cleared the message you will need to contact brother for a manual reset or service.

Same with our Brother 8640N, drum near end means toner is nearly to end but sometimes even you replace bew cartridge is appears this message. TONER LIFE END message need to replace cartridge.

The drum unit may be at it's end. There is a report you can print that will say "Drum" life at the bottom of the page. I think it's the "User Settings" or something. Though it sounds like you can't print to find this out anyway....Do you recall how many times you've changed the toner without changing the drum? Usually you can expect about 4-5 toners on every drum. Once the drum's photo sensitive coating wears off it is incapable of charging correctly to print. Might just be time for regular maintenance. [email protected] with questions.

If you open the front cover of your printer where you install the toner cartridge and press the "Clear/Back" button with it open, an option comes up on your LCD Display that says "Replace Drum?" press 1 to reset it. That should fix your problem!