Opinions Sought

[Chris Wool]

hi the longest my soljet ecosol has been left is 4 days no problem but it has to be left switched on cos after a certain time it will wake up have a clean then sleep again. long periods you had better speak to roland or bp full solvent will be more troublesome under these conditions.

chris

[Rodney Gold]

My Soljet (eco sol)was shut down for 3 weeks over December , just switched it off , came back and it printed straight away without any cleaning or user maintenance. In fact , we rarely do any maintenance barring the occasional physical clean to remove dist and grime (perhaps monthly).

[Robert Lambie]

ive done 4 days with ours also. andrew went on his hols and i was out fitting. its only us two that use it.. 😀
thing is with the true solvent machine, the maintenance thing that you do at the end of the week takes only takes a few minutes. its hardly even a clean.. you basicaly lift a cover up, dip a little foam swab in some liquid and wipe it across some little strips back and forward a couple of times.
then using a dropper type little suction stick drop a tiny amount of the liquid over the ink bays and thats it.. close lid and leave till you need to use it again.
when i was shown first time by the guy installing, what had to be done.
i said what next? he said, “thats it mate” i said “this seriously cant be the weekly maintenance chore i have heard so much about being a hassle?”
he said, “well thats all you do, so it must be”

all that said mate, i have to call b&p tommorrow so i can ask when i am onto them about long periods of time, think that would be best rather than going on my word. 😉 :lol1:

[John Cornfield]

Two grenadiers and practically no maintenance required, basically the heads are capped when located in the standby mode and when switched off so there is almost no chance of the head drying or clogging.

December is dead quiet for me so the machine is not used for 3 weeks. When i spoke with BP about the shut down, I was a bit worried about the rumours surrounding solvent printers, they ended up selling me some flush cartridges. Basically clear solvent! They suggested flushing the inksystem through with this and then reloading the normal inks on restart. I am a cinical git so here is my two pence worth an Rodney will probably keep me right being the technical whiz that he is. For the flush solvent to have any effect on the ink it surely has to be of the same or stronger than the ink at least it can be only marginally less aggressive.

The net effect of this process is you shell out a couple of hundred quid on flush and dump about the same of ink in flushing and reloading.

As Rob says no maintenance in real terms a wipe of nail polish remover in a few places and drop of special grease once a year.

For long shut down a bit of nv remover into the caps that cover the heads won’t do any harm.

As i understand all the machines on the market now are pretty much low maintenance. You don’t tend to hear any scare stories.

Cheers

John

[John Cornfield]

Just read this back missed the punchline on the shut down.

Anyway didn’t flush the system in December, turned the machine off 3 weeks later turned it on and no problems.

Main thing i have been advised by my technical friends is if your machine does snag or breakdown (highly unlikely on the grenadier in my experience) make sure you move the heads back into their capped position as the piezo heads can dry out and those little puppies aint cheap to replace. Probably good advice for any printer not just a solvent.

Cheers

John

[Gordon Forbes]

Thanks for all the advice seems to have set my mind at ease as regards this anyway
Thanks guys.
Goop

[coolinshot]

We use the much maligned “Jetsolver” and have been for over 3 years.
At first it seemed to be a major problem, following all the maintenance routines, and I had quite a few spats with the sales rep – (who denied that this was necessary when asked prior to purchase). As it happens, the Jetsolver has been fantastic. I have the maintenance routine down to a very minimal amount of time – I have just stripped down the pump and cleaned out all the pipes and sponges etc – took me about 1/2 hour and I don’t expect to have to do it again for a least a couple of weeks. The current heads have been running for over 18 months (we went through quite a lot of heads in the first 12), and the machine is running non stop (virtually) for 5 days a week. Christmas is a shut down for almost 2 weeks – so I set up a macro on my pc to print a narrow 4 colour band across the vinyl every 8 hours – it worked a dream.
Col