We’ve been using a Brother HL-5150D printer for a number of years now to print homeschooling resources, especially older novels on which the copyrights have expired. We’ve found the HL-5150D to be wonderfully inexpensive and reliable.

We go through a lot of toner and have replaced the DR-510 Drum once already. Now, the “replace drum” light was flashing at us, and the printer was refusing to print reliably. No worries, off to change the drum.

I went into The Source to buy a new DR-510 drum. The older gentleman behind the counter chuckled at us and recommended that we Google “brother drum reset procedure”.

“If you’re getting poor print quality–weird blotches, errant lines printing, et cetera–that’s indicative of a worn drum. If not, though, you really don’t need to change it. What you need to do is reset its counter so that the printer thinks you have a new drum in.”

We gratefully bought a backup toner cartridge and went home to try it.

After a fair amount of searching, we found the following instructions:

After you install the toner cartridge into the new drum unit, insert the drum unit in the printer but leave the front cover open. “Keep holding down the button until all LED’s turn on with the front cover open, then release the button.” “Make sure that the drum LED is off. Close the front cover.”
http://www.techimo.com/forum/t59757.html

I wasn’t sure which button — it was the “Go” button that the writer referred to. This procedure worked perfectly and reset the drum counter. It’s all working fine now.

So if your Brother HL-5150D printer is telling you to replace the drum, but you’re otherwise getting great printing, try the above procedure to reset the drum counter and save yourself a few dollars.