The 3800 doesn’t have the nice suction feature of my old 4000, which served to keep the paper flat throughout the full path.

Specifically, today I was printing an 21 1/2 image on some 17 x 22 Ilford Galerie GFS, and as it came out everything looked great… until the last 1.5 inches. There, exactly centered was an inch or so of scratch marks, about 1.5 inches wide.

Obviously what had happened is that the moisture of the ink caused the length of the paper to bow upwards (that is the long edges curled down) and once the paper was past the roller/teeth, it popped up and the head scratched it.

Two solutions. The obvious one was to set the platen (sic) width to “wider” which I did. But the other one was mechanical – I wanted to reduce that curl.

My solution was to take one of my 3″ diameter mailing tubes, and cut it in half, length-wise. That gave me a ‘hump’ about 1.5 inches high.

I put that on the paper support tray, about half way out running parallel to the printer body, like a speed-bump in a road. When the printer had spewed out that much paper, I guided the paper onto that “hump”, which induced a bit of a 90º curl to it, and effectively flattened the rest of the paper on its way out.

… and I managed to lose only one sheet of paper to learn this lesson.