THE ANTI JAM LIGHT IS LIGHT. AND I HAVE TO HOLD THE ON BOTTOM TO SHREDDER ANYTHING. IT WON'T STAY ON BY ITSELF

SOURCE: our shredder has been working fine, until today.

The shredder needs an electronic repair. There is a 10K ohm surface mount resistor on the jam sensor board that needs to be changed out for a 1/2W 3K or 4.7K resistor. Its rather a b to get to gracefully, mostly because it weighs so much and there is a tangle of wires inside. I will post some pictures and more detailed instructions if anyone is interested. The person who fixes this needs to be a competent electronics/mechanical repair person, pretty strong, have a good workspace with means to prop things up, some patience and pretty decent soldering skills. Further, all of the circuitry in this box is HOT WITH THE POWER LINE!!! DO NOT WORK ON IT WHILE PLUGGED IN (ask me how I know this, my friend's unit that now has a fwd/rev toggle switch on the top and no automatic circuitry at all and I have a dead $300 soldering iron on the workbench!)
Problem description: There is an optical breaker switch that detects the swinging of a flag through its light path. The switch is made of an infrared LED (light source) and a phototransistor (sensor). The design has a 29V power source. Resistor divider and the phototransistor go to the microprocessor to sense the flag. The issue is the LED current limiting resistor. As designed, there is 29V supply, 1V drop across the LED (I measured it), leaving 28V across a 10,000 ohm resistor. Dividing V by R gives us I, the current, .0028 amperes or 2.8 milliamps in the jargon. Also, we have 28 Volts times 0.0028 Amps, for .0784 Watts dissipated by that tiny resistor. 2 issues: the LED needs 10-15ma to run correctly. It was designed to not melt the resistor and barely work. As the LED got old, it's beacon grew a little dim, making the gizmo think there is a flag in the way of the light, and a (false) paper jam. So get a 3K ohm or 3.3K ohm 1/4W resistor from Radio Shack and have at it. Pull the 10K resistor, clean solder off of the bottom of the black wire, the resistor pads and the LED lead. Solder the new resistor in place between the black lead and the phototransistor. Dress it neatly so it won't interfere with the mounting of the sensor board.
One can test to make sure the sensor is the problem by pulling the 3 pin Red/Yel/Black connector off of the the circuit board. Dry assemble the box, put the bin in place and check it out. If it works, you will know that the board needs the repair to make sure the jam sensor will continue to work as intended.
This information is given as guidance for a competent TV or electronics repair person to fix this unit. The disassembly, fix and re-assembly (without pinching any wires inside!!!!, re-tie-wrap the bundles, etc.) is for a skilled repair person only.