How to stop paper curling in your laser printer – printing with the grain.

I have a Fuji – Xerox A3 printer that can staple and fold, but sometimes the paper curls up and so the printer doesn’t staple properly. I just discovered this fantastic tip from the Fuji Xerox website which has solved my problem so I thought I’d pass it on.

Paper should be fed with the grain direction parallel to the feed path. That is, a long grain A4 should be fed “long edge feed”. If you are not sure on the grain direction, simply tear a corner off one sheet, lick it and it will curl parallel to the grain direction.

 

I was feeding all my A4 pages long edge first, so that they came out sideways. This is the default way that my printer feeds. (It is an A3 printer and so it prints A4 pages sideways.) The printer prints faster this way because the page is shorter in the direction of travel.

But I did not realise that this is printing ‘against the grain’ and is what causes the paper to curl. I started printing lengthways and it’s a great improvement, especially when it’s a bit humid.

This only applies if you are printing with a laser printer because it heats up the page. This would not be an issue for an inkjet printer.  If you have an A4 printer this will probably not be an issue either because it can only print lengthways on a4  piece of paper.

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3 responses to “How to stop paper curling in your laser printer – printing with the grain.”

  1. Pointer

    Nice trick! I’m gonna try with our laser printer in the office. It frequently curls up the paper & annoys us!

    Reply
  2. Mr. Clicker

    OMG. I have got the same problem with my laser printer.

    Reply
  3. stairit

    I have used monochrome laser printer for my office work. Here I get some pre-awareness about perfect use of it and avoid paper curling. Thanks for sharing this resource.

    Reply

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