 When you want to do something for the first time, do you go straight to YouTube to see how someone else did it or do you try yourself first We like trying ourselves first. You'll learn something So here's the deal we wanted to we had to refill our toner cartridges or buy new ones and instead of YouTubeing how someone else did it. We're gonna show you on YouTube how we did it without going on YouTube That makes any sense at all So What I had here I I you'll see in the video, but I bought some powder toner And all I came with was some crappy photo copied instructions And we started with these instructions and zero plan figured it out as we ran along and we started out with black Here's the first cartridge Okay, we're gonna try and The place of toner On our cartridge here Never done this before. I haven't watched a youtube video. I have instructions that came with I bought this stuff. Let me give you a little context here five years ago My my printer said low toner. I haven't changed it since and it's been working for five years Two years two three two or three years ago. I bought some toner I still never i'm gonna change it now because one of my printing labels came out a little bit on the On the light side, but I did a test print And it looks great And abc all the colors look great that I'm gonna change it anyway. So I took the black one out Um and the instructions said basically say You know, there's a refill hole and then they give you these gears just in case you're using starter cartridges I'm not using starter cartridges Because I uh these are actual real toner cartridges So I'm gonna follow the instructions. So the thing is when you take this toner out of the printer It's you can't just replace it you have to Take the actual toner area and there's a little notchy press this and this just comes right out Really simple And as you can see here, it says you're going to avoid the warranty I this thing is expired and my printer is like 10 years old so So I spend the next six minutes or so fiddling with a screwdriver and And that paper that's on the outside thinking that I I need to worry about that paper What I learned during the first cartridge was that the screwdriver wasn't the right tool And I learned how to take the little rubber Seal out. Um, this was a good learning experience because I realized what tools I shouldn't use and what I shouldn't shouldn't waste my time doing Feels like it's all This is why they give you gloves. So now you just take one of these plastic rings and you jam it in there There looks done to me Just got to clean this off a little bit with a little I don't know paper towel and we'll see Okay, as you can see there the first cartridge was a minor fail We kind of cracked it. It took a long time. We we figured out what not to do and that was using a screwdriver So what we did with that knowledge we gained from the first stuff fail was Go on to the yellow cartridge. Here's what happened I learned from my mistakes. Number one, don't use a screwdriver to pop that top off. I ended up cracking the plastic housing On the toner cartridge and I decided I wasn't gonna wear gloves But I'm gonna wear gloves because I had to wash my hands. I made a little bit of a mess here as you can see um So for this next clip I I decided that uh gloves were a good idea and we're going to go try out the uh yellow cartridge and my first thing my alternative to the screwdriver was wire cutters, which wasn't a good idea nor was it a good idea to snip the uh the nozzle of the toner I ended up using scissors for that make the nozzle of the toner Powder uh bigger. That was pretty much it Okay, I got four different kinds of pliers here. I'm gonna try out The thing with this to getting this rubber piece out you need leverage you need some sort of angle and that's why I broke the uh The piece the first time So I found a pair of needle nose pliers to use and it took me a while to figure out the best way to do it Is to jam it in uh between the seal and the edge of the Opening and then now I use my new wider opening uh Toner powder and it seemed to work Pretty fast and I put the thing back in and that was it so as you can see there we um after the yellow cartridge we kind of found our groove a little bit better We found the right tool after One experiment and then we finally we we figured out the right tool to use and we had a couple other improvements in there Like including opening the toner A bottle a little bit more. So what happened after that? We went out to magenta Okay, now we're on to the magenta and see if I can do this faster now. Now that I have most of my um errors out of the way We'll start by taking out the toner bin So I did it again with the magenta uh cartridge but I tried pulling it out from the middle and that didn't work because the rubber seal was just kind of fragile So I had to go back to the old way of doing it and jamming it in between the edge And this one worked pretty well as As you can see here. I made a little bit of a mess, but it was it was pretty good overall All right, so after the third cartridge um We got it really into our move. We got almost everything Sorted out. We were able to get the little Seal out better. Um We still ran into problems with the toner itself And we figured that out in uh in the cyan or blue as they say which was the final cartridge where we kind of hit a home run Here we have We have the uh cyan blue. I'm going to cut my little Piece off. I'm going to do this first this time So I don't have to hold toner cartridge up While I do this Jl toner is where I got this. Let's not sponsored in any way So by the time we got to the fourth cartridge the blue one, uh, we we had our system down pat Um, it came out quick The toner went right in we had it we set up the toner ahead of time And it worked out quite nice a little bit of a mess to do it this way um But uh, it was $23 for uh, five Toner refills, which is cheaper It's uh 50 cheaper than buying the no-name brand That's it. All right, as you can see We nailed the cyan it was it the top came out quick And we even prepped our toner bottle ahead of time So that when once we got the top out we were ready to go with the toner instead of having to fiddle and remove that safety seal Which is ridiculous. There's a safety seal like I'm an eight owner But it worked out pretty good. Now here's a little, uh Wrap up about a little overhead wrap up of what we talked about in terms of our experience That's the tool I used for uh, the uh Pulling of the plug was this vise grip plier and I just grabbed it and yanked it out Screwdriver didn't work well. I ended up cracking when toner cartridge, but uh, instructions are very fairly simple For 23 bucks. I filled four toner cartridges. I'm not sure how much the price in the hundreds or I forget I'll look it up right now the official brother four pack of toner 233 dollars On amazon and I paid 23 dollars. So 10 of the cost of genuine, um, brother Toner cartridges and just for comparison I have a five pack of no-name brand called easy ink You get four new toner cartridges plus an extra black one for 52 dollars We've got three and a half stars on amazon. So whatever that means actually they have Another one that's 43 dollars for four with no extra black um So for twice as much about you can just buy new toner cartridges and be done with it But if you value your 20 or 30 or 40 dollars, uh, you can just do it yourself. So That's it. We'll see how long they last cut Final scene now Okay, so we changed our toner by ourselves without looking at youtube now It was a success Maybe I wouldn't have made a couple mistakes if I if I watched youtube videos ahead of time, but I I learned I learned to be more Patient to do to be more slow And I think I reminded myself of the fact that before you start anything you haven't done before Unless you're in a hurry and you need to know and you don't want to be bothered. I think So there's a lost art of examining something Carefully inspecting something before you begin Don't be hasty when it comes to trying something new And even if you don't do it the first day or the first time Inspect it think about contemplate what you're doing. Um, if I would have spent a little more time Because I did this live on on under my video board If I would have Spent a little more time examining it and looking at it I probably wouldn't have cracked the first toner part because I probably wouldn't have used The screwdriver, but I think physical tinkering was necessary for me to realize that the screwdriver wasn't a bad idea um, I might have been able to use some sort of um A wider plier to slowly nudge up the uh, the little lip. I don't know. Um, but I think It was extremely worth it for me to get that experience still no matter how old you are um Because it reminds you number one to to to carefully do things and never be hasty and uh I feel good that I did it without any help and then that's uh, that's that's something to be uh, proud of in 2019 um For $23 I replaced the toner in four cartridges. It's like five or six bucks a target um For just about double that amount of money at 45 50 bucks you can buy knockoffs Which are suspicious Uh to begin with um, but it's cheap. I mean printers are commodities these days, so I don't know. Maybe next time I'll I'll just buy the uh The knockoffs, but at least I have this experience under my thumb So what do you do? Do you youtube it first or do you give it a shot and learn and keep that memory in your head forever