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Gerber Edge out of register
When printing 2,3 or 4 colour process 2nd colour Is 1.5mm out of register,
Is there a way of correcting this without calling out an engineer.Bill
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3 Replies
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My gerber was doing that. Are the foils original Spandex ones? This believe it or not can cause problems with registration if they are not.
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A couple of ideas:
A common cause of poor registration is using rolls of foil with vastly different amounts of unused foil. So if your first colour is a relatively new roll with say 40 metres left on the roll and the second roll a relatively old roll with only 10 metres left on the roll, this can cause poor registration.
The second cause could be your vinyl. If the dimension of your vinyl changes after going through the Edge the first time, then you will get poor registration with the second print. Make sure that the vinyl passes through the Edge without having to be pulled through, hence elongating the sprocket holes. Perhaps print this job in the afternoon having loosened off the winds and left the roll of vinyl to ‘acclimatise’ near to the printer during the morning.
If this is happening only on the second print pass, no matter what the colour, then a work-around could be to print a tiny area just in front of your job as colour 2, and then what was your colour 2 would be colour 3. Whilst having a different colour in the design, you could print with the same colour foil so that you don’t have to load another foil into the printer. It would only waste a cm or so of foil and vinyl and add perhaps 30 seconds to your printing time.
The brand of foil that you are using wouldn’t make any difference, although I suppose that if you are mixing brands that might cause very slight registrations issues.
It’s the second time that I’ve heard of this exact issue. Colin, where are you – did you even find a solution?
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Don’t forget to clean off any glue residue/build up on the sprockets themselves!
As the vinyl rewinds back after printing the first foil, the vinyl will move out of alignement – this means it will happen on the second foil whichever colour it might be.
Use a fine point tweezer to remove the larger parts, then using isoprop alcohol remove the remainder (I use white spirit to do this quicker, but be very very careful with it – do so at your own risk!!!).
The edge requires very little maintenance to keep running smoothly, so while you’re at it, use the isoprop alcohol again and clean all the squeege blades (vinyl & foil), the printhead (that’s the brown strip), and the bail arms that keep the foil in tension.
Isoprop alcohol must be 99.9% alcohol, any less and you’re introducing moisture to the printhead which is a bad thing.
Regards,
GeoZ
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