TZ tape cartridges are easy to mangle

My favourite label printer is the Brother PT-7600.  Newer models seem engineered to waste tape, and to waste time.

The PT-7600 is still pretty good at wasting tape.  

The TZ tape cartridges are taken by many Brother label printers.  They come in widths from 6mm (or 3.5mm, sort of) to 24mm.  Some machines accept up to 18mm.

In 2017, in Japan, I bought a couple of Brother TZ label printers.  They wasted tape in crazy ways, like reverting to annoying defaults of wasting tape at the slightest excuse.  I should have done a detailed look, but they were annoying enough that they had to go in the electronic waste box, and on and away from there.  Every so often I buy a second-hand PT-7600 on ebay.

Small offcuts of wastage are produced by the feed thing, which seems to be a limitation of the cartridge format.  You can get your label now by feeding, but then an offcut is produced before the next print.  Or you can minimise label wastage, but you don't get your current label until you print the next label.  The offcuts can be used as stickers, and not too much is wasted anyway.

More wastage is produced by catching tape on the mechanism when changing cartridges.  This is easy to do.  You have to put cartidges in, and take them out, very carefully, holding the cartridge in the middle of the top and bottom faces so as not to generate rotation.  If it catches, the layers get separated, and as far as I can tell it's irrecoverable.  You don't even get stickers out of the wastage, because the layers are separated.

The layers are something like peel, background, foreground (transferred thermally when printing) and laminate.

Depicted is a mangled cartridge, along with the mechanism that mangles it if it catches:



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