The intention when making a ‘Loading Support Sheet’ (LSS) is simply to make it much easier to load paper into your printer. As ever, our experience is with Epson desktop printers mostly, but these suggestions will probably be useful for other brands too.

An LSS eases the job of the printer paper-feed mechanisms by bringing the paper sheet up towards the load mechanism - it will give the printer more time to grab the paper - and if made from a suitable material and used with papers loaded a single sheet at a time, will also reduce friction as the sheet is fed through the printer whilst printing also.

We recommend that you use a smooth material between 0.25 and 0.33inches thick (or thereabouts) - we have successfully used smooth corrugated card and also preferably corrugated plastic sheets. We cut a sheet to just under the width of the paper to be fed, and then convert the shape into an upside-down ‘T’. There will be many variants that work well. It should be fairly obvious that you will need one support sheet for each paper size that you intend to load.

You may still find that it is advantageous to hand-assist feeds of certain papers. In addition, you may need to clean the paper-take-up rollers.

Please note that MWORDS has closed. We aim to retain these support pages in the hope that they may benefit our past customers, but regret that we can no longer offer further comment or support in relation to the information above.