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Is there a safe way to clean the roller on a toner cartridge?

I have an HP laserjet at work, we use a special toner cartridge to print checks. The checks are coming out with lines down the page. When I pull back the cover of the toner cartridge, I can see toner stuck to the green roller inside. Is there a safe way to clean this roller, or should I just order another?

Public Comments

1. The special toner cartridge is a MICR toner cartridge for printing checks. The roller you're referring to on the cartridge is called the drum. The drum is where the laser creates the printed image and then picks up toner for that image and applies it to the paper. You can try to clean it by using a soft cloth or a tissue to wipe it down and remove the toner that you see and you can try to rotate the drum by hand using the gear on the end to get all the way around it. You can actually apply a fair amount of pressure as needed to clean it if necessary as I've removed labels that have stuck to the drum and had to rub out the left-over adhesive with a tissue without any significant or noticeable affect on the print, but I suspect that there may be a deeper problem within the cartridge that is causing the problem. Inside the cartridge is the toner, an applicator, metering blade and a cleaning blade that removes any residual toner from the previous print. If the metering blade, cleaning blade or applicator is worn or damaged, or if some debris of some kind is stuck inside, the problem will still be present after cleaning the drum and there really isn't much you can do about it. So go ahead and try cleaning it and see what happens, it can't hurt to try and if it works great, but if not, then you'll have to replace the cartridge to fix the print quality. Best of luck.