9810 question and offer

[dramsey]

Well, my new 9810 is now 100% completely functional.

Rebuilding the card reader was easy enough-- it's much easier to work on the 9810/20 readers than it is to work on a 65/67/97 reader. I used Katie's method since I have a huge bag of the proper O-rings. I did have to steal the drive O-ring off my existing 9180 since I only had one of those (but I've order more of them, just in case.)

Interestingly, after I finished all this, I found a complete card reader with electronics board and what appear to be the original rubber rollers in one of my parts lockers. I don't think I've ever tested it; would have been nice to find it while I had everything apart. The rubber rollers seem to be OK, weirdly. Oh well, I'm sure I'll remember it next time.

My original 9810's printer platen had disintegrated into a mess of gooey tar. I have it mostly disassembled but eventually gave up working on it; I was never able to figure out how to remove all the tar from the delicate rubber paper advance belts (are there any modern parts that could replace these?) and the parts still reside in various plastic bags. However, the associated controller board didn't have the stuck transistor my new controller board did, so plugging it into the new calc resulted in a fully functional printer.

(Somewhere in England, Tony is shaking his head...)

I labelled the faulty board and put it in the parts pile.

So now I have:

-- One fully functional 9810 (with Printer Alpha!)
-- One mostly functional 9810 (a couple of dead segments in the bottom line of the display; card reader needs new drive O-ring, unlikely ever to have a working printer)
-- One parts 9810 (doesn't really work at all)
-- A pile of 9810 boards and the mysterious card reader
-- Insane pile of manuals, documentation, and mag cards

It's not even my favorite HP. But maybe I can bring it to wherever we have the meeting this year.