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Flood Coating Clear Acrylic Panels
Hi All
We have a hit and miss record with applying reverse prints to acrylic or even just flood coating a solid colour. We;ve tried different vinyls and wet and dry applications all with mixed results.
Anybody suggest anything to help improve the quality of reverse applied acrylic prints?
Would applying dry with a hot laminator help?
Thanks
Warren
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8 Replies
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What issues are you encountering?
We’ve done loads of these, albeit with a frost vinyl on the back, but never had an issue running them through the laminator.
Cleanliness is vital, we wipe over the acrylic with IPA, and wipe it down as the acrylic is feeding into the laminator in an attempt to reduce dust attracted by static.
We’ve used anti static foam from maplins too in the past.
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David
Are you wiping down again with IPA as it goes through or with something else?
I find static is a ***** with acrylics
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Yep, Mircrofibre cloth with some IPA, as we remove the backing as it goes through the rollers, we just swipe side to side with Microfibre with some IPA on it.
We still get the occasional flaw, but no as bad as when first started
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Spot on David – we do exactly the same pretty much.
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and obviously you doing it dry then? We get marks all over, if you did it dry with a squeegee you would see all the squeegee marks, we get a similar mottled type finish if we do it dry on our Roller table.
When we do it wet we are usually OK but have had issues with what look like watery stains no matter how much we squeegeed and rolled.
Tried different vinyls with different adhesives and different application fluids, still not found a 100% perfect solution.
Dust and loose arm hairs aside 😉 lol
So you say dry straight through a laminator is best? Will give it a try.
As a side note, we usually not too bad with photographic work, it’s solid colours and optically clear prints that are the worse.
cheers for the help so far chaps
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Optically clear?? Phah!
Just print on the MD5 gloss laminate, and stick it down.
Although we mainly back up with Frost Vinyl (again metamarks) and we’ve not had a complaint.
Have you tried laminating the solid colour to the clear, before applying both to the acrylic??
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David, great idea, can’t believe I didn’t think of it 😉 lol
We can print white and need to leave clear background so for stuff that has to be printed or too small for cut vinyl we print on clear and mount to clear acrylic but it needs to be optically clear.
Will give your suggestion a try thanks
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Hi
spraying the opposite side of the acrylic will cut down if not exclude the static completelyKev
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