Disassembling a Brother MFC-J450DW Printer

This is a rough guide that shows a Brother MFC-J450DW printer being disassembled for use in a later project. The printer came with the capabilities to print, scan, and fax but only printing was needed. The scanning and faxing components were removed to provide easier access to the printing internals of the machine.

The lid of the printer was opened and the first panel was removed by a combination of unscrewing and prying.

All screws above the main printing component were removed.

The display and buttons were pulled off of the printer. You get to see an interesting look at the capacitive buttons that are used to control the printer.

Pull out the paper tray for now.

Unplugged the ribbon cables for the front display and the scanner.

Removed all of the fax components. It is recommended that you save the gears and stepper motor. These can be used in many other projects.

The scanner components were then removed. Better yet, another stepper motor was found!

It can be seen from these pictures that the printer does not dispense ink directly from the cartridges. Instead it pumps the ink out of them and into the print head.

Removed some screws and exposed the circuit boards underneath.

Installed the ink in the printer.

Had to tape down the safety switches to make the printer think all the covers were closed (the covers were removed entirely).

Started up the printer and it started cleaning the print heads automatically. After that was done, it was ready to print.

Ran a test print.

The first part of this tutorial was to show that you can remove the scanner and fax and still have a working computer. The second part will show the complete tare down of the printer. This begins by removing the wires attached to the PCB.

Removing the PCB for the LAN connection and ink readings.

Removed the main PCB

Removed the printers speaker. It has a very strong magnet built in.

Separated the chassis from the parts responsible for printing.

Begin to remove the ink pumps

Found a small encoder.

This motor has an attached encoder.

I learned a lot about how a printer actually functions from this tare down. The hardest part was resisting the urge to break parts off. I had to keep double and triple checking to find that newly revealed screw that needed to be removed.