Pen plotter making holes in the paper

I have a feeling that this is a dumb question for anyone who is an
experienced pen plotter user, but I'm not, and I've spent several hours
trying to make headway solving this problem with no success.

I have a subcontractor who produces drawings for us which he plots for draft
purposes on an A3 Epson inkjet printer. However, here in the office we have
an A1 pen plotter (OCE 1954) which I prefer to use when I can because of the
larger plot size.

Very often, the drawings we want to plot are 2D layouts from a 3D model which
includes a lot more detail than we need. When plotted at small scale, this
often results in the pen plotter trying to draw a large number of thin lines
very close together. The inevitable result is that the pen makes a hole in
the paper and wrecks the plot.

In the past I have solved this problem by deleting the detail from the
drawing, or turning off layers on which too much detail appears. Deleting
detail is obviously stupid - if we didn't need it we would not get it drawn
in the first place - and turning layers off only works if they have
originally been created with this problem in mind.

How do I tell the plotter to ignore multiple lines which are very close
together so that this does not happen? I find it very hard to believe that
this is not a function which can be automatically achieved using a setting in
AutoCAD, the driver or the plotter itself, but I'm damned if I can find it. I
think I must be looking for the wrong thing in the manual and help files.

I'm using AutoCAD LT 2002 on Windows XP Home.

Any help gratefully received.

Nick.