Patent ID: 7946684

Claim:
A method of manufacturing a printer which has a chassis and at least one printhead module removable from the chassis for maintenance or replacement, the or each module having a print element and having a prescribed position relative to the chassis defined with respect to that print element of the module, the correct functioning of the printer being dependent on the maintenance within predefined tolerance of the positioning error for any module between actual and prescribed positions, the method comprising the steps of: providing a population of printhead modules, each having a plurality of alignment features, each module having an alignment error in the print element relative to each module alignment feature of the module, the variance over the population in said alignment error significantly exceeding said predefined tolerance; providing a succession of chassis for use in the manufacture of successive printers, each chassis comprising a plurality of complementary alignment features; and engaging the alignment features of each module from the population with the complementary alignment features of the associated chassis thereby forming n elastic interference couplings for each module; wherein the variance in said position error over the succession of manufactured printers is significantly less than the variance in said alignment error over the population of modules.