The Fix

A wide tip black Sharpie resting on a green and yellow cutting mat

The solution to yesterday’s near-disastrous Riso breakdown (meltdown?): a black Sharpie.

For context — aka how I did I end up in this situation? Each Risograph ink drum has a strip of black light-aborbing material on the rear side of the master clamp. The Riso bounces light off this black strip to detect whether a master (stencil) is present on a drum or not. What I’ve since learned is that aftermarket parts use a material that’s not quite as good as official parts from Riso1.

In my case, this meant that during the set up of up a newly clean drum, the machine got confused and thought there was a master on the drum when in fact there was not. This in turn led to a mess of ink on the pressure rollers inside the machine as well as on the internal transfer belts — all of which I needed to thoroughly clean.

The fix — or to at least improve the light-absorption of the aftermarket strips is to draw over them using a simple black Sharpie. Dumb, but sufficiently effective, at least until I can attempt to get official replacement parts — or source a better material.

Footnotes

  1. If you’re thinking gee Scott, why didn’t you just use official Riso parts? I would say that’s a fair question, but unfortunately official parts are tough to come by if you’re not an authorized retailer or service tech. And so for most of us, it’s after-market parts all the way down.