Patent ID: 7609986

Claim:
An image forming apparatus comprising: an image carrying member to carry a toner image; a drive device to drive the image carrying member; a cleaning member to slide in contact with the image carrying member so as to remove toner remaining on the image carrying member after transferring the toner image onto a sheet from the image carrying member; a controller, so as to perform a reverse rotation to rotate and stop the image carrying member in a reverse direction of a forward direction at time of image formation and then perform a forward operation to rotate and stop the image carrying member in the forward direction, to control the drive device on the basis of a use amount of the image carrying member; and rotation number detecting means for detecting the number of rotations of the image carrying member in the forward direction, wherein the cleaning member includes a cleaning blade and a portion where the cleaning blade and the image carrying member slide in contact with each other is located above a middle point of the image carrying member, and the cleaning member includes a recovery blade opposite to the cleaning blade and a spiral auger provided between the cleaning blade and the recovery blade so as to convey toner scraped off from the image carrying member, and wherein the controller uses the number of rotations from the rotation number detecting means as a use amount of the image carrying member, thereby decides a rotation amount of the reverse operation and a rotation amount of the forward operation.