Photosmart 7520 out of paper message

[dlzcpa]

When I attempt to print from either the regular or photo try I get a message that the printer is out of paper when its not.  The printer was working fine until recently.

[Bob_Headrick · Accepted solution]

The document here may help resolve false "out of paper" errors on the Photosmart 7520.

[dsimoes]

After trying all the procedures in the document above I still had the problem.

I took a hand mirror and looked at the gears in the 'paper feed' area, and realized that a gear was out of place and causing the paper not to move forward (look at the gears above those 2 rollers that move the paper forward).

Once I moved the gear back to its place to engage the other gears, the rollers started to work and the 'out of paper' message stopped. The printer is working without problems now. I printed several pages to make sure the gear wouldn't move from its correct place again. 

I just hope the gear doesn't start falling off place all the time. I may have to open the printer and figure out if it's glued into place or find another solution. But so far this solved this annoying problem. 

[Judy12341]

You indicated that a gear was out of place which resolved the problem, but can you describe the gear? I am having the exact problem and have cleaned all wheels, etc., but still not working. Thanks!

[cbleman]

(Please excuse me if I don’t use exact HP proper terminology for the arms and rollers. I'm pretty sure I can convey the problem though.)

It's the gear that runs the feed roller arm from the top of the carriage. Once I read the above post, I started looking for a gear out of place, and noticed the drive gear had slid totally out of the drive train.

 A feed roller arm comes down and rests the feed rollers on the top sheet of paper. In the feed roller arm are a series of plastic gears run by main one from the top that engages when the arm comes down. When it works properly, it looks like the feed roller should push the top sheet of paper up into the pic rollers. The top plastic drive gear on my unit slides freely along a driver bar, and had slid out of the drive train. Unlike the person who posted the first post about re aligning the gear, re aligning the gear to the feed arm in my case did not work.

    Once I re alligned the gear,  the feed rollers move as long as there is no pressure on them. As soon as pressure is applied to the arm when the rollers hit the paper however, the drive bar spins inside the plastic gear, and will not drive the feed rollers to properly feed the paper.

  I admit that I am not a printer repair tech, and could be wrong. From the number of posts I found on this subject on the web, this looks like a common problem. People are reporting cleaning the rollers as suggested in another post, and still getting an out of paper error. When I manually feed a sheet of paper into the pic rollers, the printer works flawlessly.

[dsimoes]

This problem kept coming back. Called HP Support and they didn't have any suggestion besides replacing the printer.

So, the printer was thrown into the garbage. Hopefully they will prevent such small problems from completely making the printer unoperable. 

[FlickLives]

What an ingenious find about the plastic drive gear being mis-aligned! The drive gear is seated on a knurled part of the shaft.  I realigned the gear, but unfortunately, the inside of the gear has stripped out and the drive shaft will not spin it when there is any pressure. So sad that a 5 cent part can be the downfall of the machine. I see no way to replace the gear and the cost of servicing it, given the age of the printer,  outweighs buying a brand new one. I will check CR to see what the front running printer is today. Such an inconvenience as I was printing my first supporting tax document for this year.