advice on time scale before lamination please?

[Chris Wool]

quote :

what will happen if i do them to soon?

your knob will drop off.

most of the time it will be fine but tell the customer you hurried them along and hope they will be ok. (customer fault if it goes wrong)

[Neil Bainbridge]

ok chris thanks for that

[Mo Gillis-Coates]

I did a rush job the other week, left them for 6 hours bbfore laminating, guess what? They bubbled and looked bad, had to do them again. I recommend at least 48 hours, if you can’t get away with that 24 is absolute min!

Youll only have to do them again……. and that hurts!

[Karl Williams]

Chris is right on what he says mate. But your knob won’t drop off! :lol1: :lol1: 😉

[Chris Wool]

must be down to vinyl and ink type then. waiting 6hrs is a life time for me.

i use ij40 and the matching lam with eco solmax inks and waiting 2hrs at most. really do not have a problem.

if light ink load may get laminated almost straight away.

i will wait 24 hrs when doing wrap stuff. only fair its half the thickness.

[Kevin Flowers]

Same as Chris i have taken it from the machine straight to the laminator, only when i need to though.

Kev

[Ian Davies 2011]

When printing wraps we use either 3M or Grafityp vinyl and Ecosol Max inks, we leave for 48 hours to be absolutely sure with this type of material, once lost a contract worth £15K plus when we used to sub out our wrap printing, the sign company used exactly the same wrap material and inks as we do but didnt leave it to outgas before laminating, the wrap bubbled up within a week and the client was not impressed but we had no idea at the time the other company had not let it outgas.

Ian.

[Martin Oxenham]

We usually leave prints overnight but if we have an urgent one or if we have just cocked up a piece when fitting to a van then we blast it from the back with a heat gun. I can’t see it out gassing or drying anymore if it was left at room temperature to dry than if it was blasted with heat.
Do it from the back though or you may cause the surface to dry first and not deeper in, just like the skin on paint. We have used small stuff straight off the machine this way.

[Peter Normington]

its not just a matter of the ink drying.
the solvents do affect the adhesive, so it is important with anything that is required to stay put that the recommended drying times are adhered to.
laminate to soon at your own risk…

Peter

[Martin Oxenham]

Correct me if I’am wrong…But the solvent sort of carries the ink and burns into the vinyl. As it drys the solvent evaporates leaving the base ink behind.
Surely heating it will cause the stuff to dry and the waste solvent to evaporate much quicker than if its just left in a warm room. The heaters on the machine cause the pores in the structure of the vinyl to open and the inks penetrates the material. Once thats done it just needs to evaporate the waste and dry.

[Peter Normington]

Martin,
not quite that straight foreword.
flash heating will get rid of most of the solvent, but the chemical composition of the adhesive needs time to recover, without going into pages of equations, and explanations, most wraps systems, and indeed most digital vinyl manufactures state an outgassing period, before laminating, If they thought they could gain a commercial advantage by stating that their vinyl needed less time to cure after printing, then I am sure they would be shouting it from the rooftops!

if you need to laminate off the printer, then a latex or uv printer? is the way to go
Peter

[David Rowland]

latex is better suited for wraps the uv ink.

with regards heating up the solvents, what you say is correct but if you keep it at that heat for a long period you end up warping the material too much.

[Matt Rhoades]

As a rule we leave our prints 24hrs to gas out before lamination. We haven’t had any problems yet. Fingers crossed, touch wood!!!!! 😀 . The temperature of our workshop and our print room are always very close and quite well controlled. So there are no drastic changes in temperature between print and lamination. Even overnight. I think this helps.

Matt