9050 Tray 4 says it's empty when it isn't

[Tom_K1]

I have several HP 9050's with Tray 4 installed, lately I'm getting a message to load tray 4 when there is still plenty of paper in the tray. I have swapped trays and chassis around, no luck. On one machine I swapped the device that prevents the tray from crashing down hard when the drawer is pulled, that seems to have fixed it on one machine but I have another doing it and that did not work (I have a couple of older junk trays I pull parts from). The tray lifts OK, but when it gets to the top and should start feeding, the led blinks orange and it won't feed. Opening and closing the drawer will sometimes work but not often enough to live with. These trays are loaded with legal-sized pressure seal check stock. Any ideas?  Thanks.

[Imagenet_Tech]

Hello, does the tray work when you swap it with tray 3 or 2 and vise versa? Also, when you close the tray, look at the control panel and see what type of paper it is asking you for. It is possible that the application or driver might be glitchy and asking for a specific type of paper. Quick work around is set tray 4 to "Any Type", and see if that changes anything. Also, remove tray 3 and install tray 4, watch the tray closely to make sure the tray is actually lifting properly. Worst case is you may need to replace the input assembly/paper pickup assembly.

Hope this helps....

[Tom_K1]

Thanks for the reply, but Tray 4 on a 9000 series is the high-capacity accessory tray, not the same animal as the 500-sheet trays 2 & 3. It's also not a paper type or size issue, the printer thinks the tray is empty.

[Imagenet_Tech]

Okay, well than check the media sensors and see if anything is damaged, if anything the pickup/input assembly may need to be replaced.

[Tom_K1 · Accepted solution]

OK fixed it. I use the high-capacity tray 4 on these machines to hold legal-sized pressure-seal paychecks, and the alignment has to be just right. The paper guides have a lot of play in them after a while, so I was snugging them up as best I could to preserve print alignment, and it turns out that as the tray rose as checks are feeding out, the guides were snugging up too much and the lifting motor couldn't overcome the friction. Loosening up the guides solved the problem, I just need to keep an eye on image drift when printing a big payroll. Hope this helps anyone else who runs into this.