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HP Maintenance Kit

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Fusers

HP CF065A 220V Maintenance Kit for HP Laserjet M601, M602 and M603 series Printers.

HP Part CF065A is the 220V Maintenance Kit for HP Laserjet M601, M602 and M603 series Printers.

The maintenance kit replaces the parts shown in the picture to the left, some cassette pickup rollers, transfer roller and the fuser. It is generally reckoned that the cartridge replaces 70% of the parts likely to fail in a printer; the maintenance kit replaces most of the rest. With a succession of cartridges and maintenance kits these printers are capable of working lives to a million pages (predecessors like the LaserJet 4200 printers have gone beyond 1.5 million).

Yield for the CF065A is said to be 225,000 pages. HP say Actual yields vary considerably based on images printed and other factors. For more information, visit http://www.hp.com/go/learnaboutsupplies. (but its a bit disappointing, so if you want more information (too much) read on).

Fusers and rollers are parts that inevitably wear out in laser printers.

Fusers are the expensive replacement part in a maintenance kit. Fusers range between £50 for some of the smaller Brother and Samsung machines through to £700 and up in some big copiers. The fuser in the CF065A kit is RM1-8396 (also known as CE988-67902) and it is fairly expensive at £160 or so, however it is quite a nice piece of work. The beautiful thing about it is that it is an installable module - end users can fit it.   In lesser printers the fuser is an engineer installable part.

A fuser is essentially a pair or rollers, a hot roller spring loaded against a silicone rubber pressure roller. Paper with the print-pattern outlined in toner passes through the nip point between the rollers and the combination of heat and pressure makes toner bond strongly to the page.

This is an "instant on" fuser. The hot roller is a thin-walled foil , silicone and PTFE (aka Telfon) sleeve over a glass-ceramic thick-film resistor heater. This mechanism can heat up very rapidly. Where older printer of the "LaserJet 4" generation had to either keep the fuser hot or keep the user waiting the LaserJet M601 can be printing in 8 seconds from cold. HP and Canon introduced this idea in the little LaserJet 4L in the mid 1990s, used it in the 5L and then applied it to almost all printers. Its a mature technology.

Ordinary fusers need to heat through before use.


Instant-on fusers save energy by heating up the instant a page is to print.

What Limits Fuser Life ?

The sleeve has a limited life.   Non-stick properties decay with constant use, primarily through abrasion. PTFE is a very good non-stick material but a poor conductor of heat so the compromise to get a working fuser is a thin layer. Paper is quite abrasive and the leading edge is sharp, so ultimately the PTFE material develops holes and fails. Failure points often develop first at the edge of the sleeve due to the change in pressure and increased abrasion around the papers sides - a phenomenon called edgewear. Ultimately the sleeve backing will fail due to fatigue fractures and the whole thing falls apart giving one of the 50 errors. Fuser failures are disruptive to office routine and if you don't have a maintenance kit handy could bring production to a halt for a day or so. To prevent disruption the printer warns when a new kit is likely to be required. Depending on the paper used and typical page-cover a fuser could have a shorter life; usually they last for some time beyond the warning message. (When the warning is given is adjustable).

Fusers are also prone to accidents. A fairly common office practice is to print a sheet of labels one or two at a time by passing the sheet back through the printer. There are warnings in the user guides saying NOT to do this ie: Do not print partial sheets of labels (Ch 6 p 70). Unfortunately labels will sometimes get stuck in the fuser. If this happens soak the label off with alcohol; never poke at it with a knife, the thin sleeve is easily pierced. Removing a label from a fuser is difficult because the innards are hot after use and obscured by finger guards and shields. There is a lot more about fusers here.

Transfer Roller

Transfer rollers run just under the cartridge OPC drum. The transfer roller takes the image in toner powder from the drum and using an electric charge pulls it onto the paper. Like anything in contact with the edges of the paper the transfer roller will get worn, it also tends to pick up any dust present in the paper. Signs that the transfer roller is worn are when print fades. There are many other other causes of fading and for some fixes try here.

Replacement transfer rollers supplied as part of a kit usually come with a little hook. If not, handle the roller by its blue cog and shaft and avoid touching the black working surface. Be careful, because the cog easily falls off the shaft.

Pickup and Feed Rollers

Rollers are not costly and people often replace them more often than the fuser - whenever the printer begins to misfeed. Feed kits are available here .

The white-cored pickup roller at the back of the cassett space (RM1-0036) is for paper pickup; moving it forward rather than actually lifting it. It doesn't actually do a great deal of work, so it may not wear quickly.

HP Information

HP Partsurfer for some reason doesn't recognise user-maintenance kit part numbers such as CF065A but does respond to the service exchange part numbers.   It says about CF065-67901:

Icecat says this maintenance kit has both a short product code CF065A and two GTINs (EAN/UPC): 0886111320158,   8861113201584

The CF065A is also known as CF065-67901

CF065-67901 fits the HP Laserjet M601, M602, M603 series printers

What is Really in the Box

Don't be too disappointed if we say "pot luck". There will be a fuser, a transfer roller and SOME RM1-0037 feed rollers for cassette tray 2 etc.   Recent experience is that you may get quite a lot of these; up to 10, sufficient for a printer and four accessory feeder units. There should be an instruction sheet too; HP's list says so. The white-cored roller RM1-0036 may not be included in official HP kits, despite what it says above. White cores imply it isn't meant to be changed! … The official HP kits can change specification without notice - have a look at the variety in Google images. Most traders online are just using the HP stock shot of a brown box.

If you need RM1-0036 pickup rollers we sell them here .

We have some extensive cover on what the pickup and feed rollers do and why the pickup rollers may be less prone to wear here.

Web Research

A Google Query on CF065A gave About 34,100 results with the first in organic search being as follows:

hp.com £ 309, printware.co.uk £301.55, tonercare.co.uk £269.50, zhcckj.en.alibaba.com contact P & A on request, alibaba.com list no info, hpfuserkits.com P & A on request, alibaba.com no info, provantage.com $284.01, hp-parts.en.alibaba.com P & A on request, dailymotion.com irrelevant page, mysuresupply.co.uk £294.32, hpprinterstore.co.uk £305.00, hp.pantherdata.com.au $247.26, alpha-international.eu P & A on request, metacafe.com irrelevant page, idealo.co.uk £246.65, fastprinters.com $387.96, uk.insight.com £262.99, amazon.co.uk £367.83, shopbot.com.au Nanobyte solutions $229.81, myshopping.com.au $290.68+$10, icecat.us product codes only, colemans-online.co.uk £646.05, idealo.de € 323.96, bestbuy.com $323.82, shopbot.ca DirectDial $347.00, fuss3inkandtoner.co.uk £263.37, getprice.com.au $290.68+$11,

Prices noted were intended to be for a new item, one off, without tax. The list is as encountered. We haven't bothered with currency conversion - half of our readers are outside the UK and are more interested in dollar prices. Quite a range of prices then !

Google sponsored ads on 23rd May 2015. All but one use the same anonymous brown box, the other has an accurate picture that doesn't match the text on the website. Its not a wonder there is a "whats in the box" problem.

We repeat the Web-search exercise from time to time. Here is the Google top-10 for May 2015:

www8.hp.com no price, cartridgesave.co.uk £266.57, Amazon UK_Trade_Surplus £249.96 free delivery, Amazon AccutekImaging $258.06, Provatage $280.24, ceneo.pl (irrelevant), mysuresupply.co.uk £285.41, rightparts.co.uk £299.90, stinkyinkshop.co.uk £219.86

Looking through Google organic search and the sponsored ads UK vendors prices varied from £156 to £348. The second bunch of ten prices was all new product so far as we can tell but "rightparts" were offering a refurb for £229. We could find other refurbs for prices from £75 upwards - prices all over the place then!

So far Web research has yielded little actually about the CF065A maintenance kit or RM1-8396 fuser. Re-presentations of the same old catalogue stuff scraped from HP, distributor lists or Icecat are about all that is out there. The product has only been around for a couple of years and we suspect it gives very little trouble. There are a few irrelevant pages triggered by the code. All the rest in the lists above were merely vendors giving no more information than found in the HP brochure. The only helpful pages we found were printertechs.com which has installation instructions - and curiously Google didn't list them very highly? Perhaps the M601 is too recent to have needed many maintenance kits? Or maybe they cause no trouble?

Price Variation, Logistics and Delivery

Price variation over the range from £220 through to £320 or more for this product is odd because most vendors are offering the same thing - probably out of the same DHL logistics warehouse at East Midlands Airport.   HP use DHL logistics and there is a big DHL courier hub at East Midlands. Coincidentally only one UK distributor was showing significant stock in May 2015 (just 19 though) and they happen to use DHL for stockholding and fulfilment.

Variations just seem to reflect different pricing policies. Some websites take the attitude that people won't shop around.

With the M600 series (M601, M602, M603 / M604, M605, M606 ) HP have turned all the major components of the printer bar the power supply and motor/chassis/cogs assembly into user changeable cartridges. You won't ordinarily need an engineer to fix the printer - and they won't have to send one out to cover warranty.

To dealers and distributors maintenance kits aren't just like cartridges; they are potentially more trouble. This is partly because HP has chosen to price the kit a little expensively for what it is. It is still "good value" in the sense that if it sells for £225.00 it contributes just 0.1p to the price per page -since it should last 225,000 pages; but it is only a fuser.   Brother and Samsung often sell fusers for under £100. Its not an entirely fair comparison, because cheap fusers don't just plug in. But this fuser is not massively more complicated than a cartridge. As suggested above the usual fault is just degeneration of the foil-coated sleeve, and given time, inclination and materials an engineer can actually fix that.

Fusers are more trouble and that is reflected in HP's error message list for the LaserJet M601 series. The new 10.23 range deal with the fuser, the 10.26 range with the maintenance kit - but the 50.xx range still deal with specific fuser problems.

Logistics for maintenance kits aren't the same either because at most one will sell for every fifteen or twenty CE390A or CE390X cartridges. Your local cartridge shop will quite likely have a CE390A print cartridge on the shelf and there are dozens in the "channel" for next day delivery. But in May 2015 not so many CF065A kits - or even a great heap of RM1-8396 fusers waiting to made into kits - a different distributor (in Denmark) had just 35 of those.

Provenance of Parts

Maintenance kit price variation can also be explained by the code "CF065A" being interpreted different ways:

HP Original CF065A	HP authorised parts with an HP instruction sheet and covered by HP warranty.
Brown Box CF065A	Either of: CF065-67901 or RM1-8396 (CE988-67902) supplied to a distributor as an engineering part and packed with a set of HP (or Canon) rollers by a distributor or dealer. Your relationship is with the dealer you bought the kit from, theirs is with HP or whoever they got the specific part from.
"Our CF065A"	Where dealers and distributors have made kits up using an fuser RM1-8396 fuser that may be new or may be refurbished and may or may not use HP/Canon rollers. If it is a refurbed fuser the vendor will usually make this clear; (but not always, and sometimes in very small print).
Chinese CF065A	Provenance of fuser or rollers may or may not have any claim to be original parts. There certainly are "compatible" parts around and unfortunately some of them aren't good.

Why do distributors make up brown-box maintenance kits?   Engineers have become used to asking for "maintenance kits",   this is a good thing because most problems with HP's office quality printers are fixable without even touching a screwdriver thanks to good design.   However HP exploit that a bit, their price for a maintenance kit that is sometimes significantly higher than for a fuser and a set of rollers. What the HP kit gives you is unarguable simplicity. They generally are good about warranty.

I think we all know why alibaba, aliexpress etc are full of Chinese vendors claiming to make the fuser sleeves. Wherever a brand offers something at a high price the counterfeiters follow behind.

Supply Situation

Our price for new HP original maintenance Kit CF065A was £184.16 with £8 shipping on top -but this was based on a low level of stock at a distributor - and we were being unnecessarily competitive in view of the research above!   More normally we expect the price to be around the £210 level - so we should be able to beat most of the ink salesmen noted above.

Prices on this part have been a bit odd in early 2015. At the end of July the fuser alone had a price of £205 whilst the maintenance kits were £190.   This sometimes happens - and if you always buy maintenance kits beware - sometimes the price of HP kits can be rather higher than buying a fuser and all the parts. We list things both ways in the sales side-bar.

The part is listed by five distributors, two hold stock - but one at rather high prices. We think demand for this part will be high, but in May 2015 it has yet to materialise. After all, this is a fairly recent printer and many will only just be coming out of warranty and getting beyond 225,000 pages.

We can provide these parts when required. The price is about £225.

These are guidelines, our prices change with distribution lists - see the catalogue.

Copyright G & J Huskinson & MindMachine Associates Ltd 2013, 2015. Some pictures derived from HP User and Service guides. These technical pages do not constitute an offer for sale; just our knowledge at the time of writing. See the catalog. Sales pages on this Web site use cookies to store user information. We also use Google Analytics to track site useage patterns.