Re: photocopier toner- what is it?

Dennis Southwood (dms1@home.com)
Tue, 11 Nov 1997 19:57:35 -0800

George Mackie wrote:
>
> Can anyone explain how photocopier works please. All I know is that the
> toner is negatively charged and attracts to the + charges created on the
> paper but how do they make the latent image on the paper + charged in the
> first place, and what is the chemical composition of the toner.
> If you stop the copier before the paper has gone through the hot rollers
> at the end, the image is still soft and smears easily, so heat is
> necessary to fix it in place on the paper.

Les Lawrence, who heads the ceramics department at Grossmont College in
San Diego, has been working with different methods for getting images
onto ceramic items. In a workshop, he told us that copier (and laser
printer) toner is about 30% iron oxide, and the rest is a plastic
material that melts and fuses the oxide to the paper. He said that he
was trying to get a toner recycler to fill the cartriges with other
materials, such as cobalt, manganese, ceramic stains, etc. I don't know
how that worked out. You might be able to track it down through the
Ceramics Web at http://apple.sdsu.edu/ceramicsweb/ceramicsweb.html

-- 
Dennis M. Southwood
dms1@home.com