Problems with Boca Lemur ticket printers

This may sound silly, but when I have experienced this, it was because someone loaded the tickets "backwards". Since it seems periodic, this sounds possible. A little trick we did was tape a ticket onto the top of the printer facing the correct direction to show the cashiers the correct way to load it. I hope this helps!

Hi Sian - are your bocas in a dusty environment? We had this issue a lot with ours when I used to be boxoffice manager, I dont think we ever really got to the bottom of what caused it entirely. I agree with Mark that the tickets being loaded incorrectly is defiantly an issue as the sensor gets confused but it certainly wasnt the only issue as it used to happen even if the tickets were loaded correctly too. Our bocas were under the front desk so would get dusty quite quickly, we also didn't have space for the ticket feeders which possibly caused the tickets to feed in slightly skewed which might also have affected the sensor. Our current Boxoffice Manager is on annual leave at the moment, but on his return I will ask him if he has discovered any fixes in recent years.

Hi! So, we had this similar issue and what I discovered as the solution is to make sure that the machine is definitely not dusty! Then just like Mark said to make sure the ticket header is feeding in correctly.

Have you cleaned the Opti-Eye and the print head? Sometimes the print head can get super dirty - take an alcohol wipe and wipe it down. Use a can of air to clean the Opti-Eye so that it can see where it's supposed to print/cut. 

Also - does it do the same thing when you select "cut between orders" rather than "cut between ticket"? That would be a good test to see what's going on.

I have some PDFs of cleaning how-to - let me know if you want me to send them your way!

I don't know about the tickets cutting in the middle, but for the extra tickets coming out after- are you selling merch or parking or something other than a performance as a performance? If that performance doesn't have a ticket template associated with it, it will pop out blank tickets. We had this issue when we sold parking as a performance. 

I agree with everyone so far - incorrect loading and dust causes this; but I have also had this issue if the tickets are not secured. It will happen that they will print fine most of the time, then some of them will be slightly on an angle, and then the BOCA will stop printing and spit out a couple of blank tickets. To address this you need to take the lid off and make sure the plastic slide is as close to the ticket as possible. Even if it a little way out it can cause this issue. Happy to send a photo for a visual explanation if that helps!

Thank you all so much for your replies. 

The tickets are all loaded the correct way and we don't think the room is dusty but maybe it is more dusty than we realise! If anyone has any cleaning instructions you're able to send that would be great. We have some already but would nice to see if there's anything we're missing. 

We are selling merchandise but they have tickets attached to them and the blank tickets seem to be very sporadic - sometimes after printing a single free ticket with no receipt and other times after printing group tickets, merchandise and receipts. 

Does anyone have any ticket feeders and would you recommend them? 

Sure thing Sian! What's your e-mail address and I'll send over the cleaning instructions I have!

Thank you so much. It's sian.morris@courtauld.ac.uk

Hi Joel,

Hope you're well, and thanks for this.

Following the thread as part of the Box Office Team at Cheltenham Festivals (UK), and would love to receive the PDFs mentioned if possible

Many thanks in advance and very best wishes,

Martin