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Trying to prevent head strikes
Hi, Looking for some advice regarding preventing head strikes. We’ve 2 printers here, a Roland EJ640 & Roland XR640. Over the past 12 months both machines have required new heads due to strikes 🙁 The XR has this really frustrating habit of running a cleaning cycle through the night meaning that our inital plan of running large quantities of stickers over night onto the take up roller can’t be allowed to happen. Print finishes, machine cleans itself, heads strike material which has rippled due to the heat, heads get destroyed, game over 🙁
Our biggest concern with the EJ is we run large amounts of posters for theatres and even by the the time the machine has heated up the poster paper has started to ripple (I believe it technical term is "cockling"). We tried storing the paper is the office where its warmer to try to limit moisture in the paper but this still isn’t working. The printers are located in the workshop which is generally unheated apart from a large gas blow heater in the really cold weather. Thankfully an oil fired heater is due to be fitted in the next few weeks.
In an attempt to prevent the "cockling" of the paper we’ve switched over to a low cost "lay flat" material as used for pull up banners. This prints great, doesn’t cockle but drys terrible, its tends to stick to itself when put on the take up roller. There is no custom profile so we’re running Metamark MD5 and "sign&display" in Versaworks. Thinking of buying a infrared heater to sit in front to help dry the media.
Any thoughts with regards to media storage / getting the material to dry would be great.
Thanks,
Davy -
17 Replies
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Hi David,
Depending on space, could you not build a designated small room for the media, insulate it and put a dehumidifier in there?
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That’s always a thought James but we’re running out of space rapidly. We’d thoughts of doing away with our showroom and putting the office there instead then moving the printers and media in there. The showrooms cold though so means trying to pipe heating in there too which is on the other side of the building. Not impossible but the buildings only rented so if we move will be money lost. Hard to know what to do
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catch 22 with solvent papers more heat to dry it quicker = more cockling less heat less cockling does not dry quick enough. seams to be regardless of storage with in reason that is. i dont do a grate deal of posters but have to be careful when i do.
when i had a Aquarius printer cant remember it was a problem as you have a serious outlet may be worth a look at epsom hp printers, not latex possibly talk to Clive (Rep) at papergraphics he may be able to advise better. -
Hi David, I would say all this area would benefit from being in a insulated/heated area. You’d also gain extra storage on the roof of the structure. I guess it depends how long you’ll be in the unit for I guess
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Paper can’t help with other than say been there before…
But we run the 3164 from orajet for labels and stickers. Has a thicker backing paper I think so stops the cockling.. compared to the cheap monos we have had anyway.
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Hi david
Have you checked the vacuum is set to 100%?
You can tell the machines when you want to clean (or turn it off altogether) it’s in the sub menu under periodic clean.
I have an ej but don’t print much poster paper but completely understand the situation you’re facing, is the head crash situation the same in the summer as the winter?
Do you like to run the machines overnight due to the volume of work you have (ie are they running all day at full capacity or is there another reason?
Cheers
Alex
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Cheers guys, a few ideas there. We’ve only recently changed to layout of the workshop around to give us more length. We’re located near several car garages and often have 2 vehicles in at a time doing advertising on them. An insulated and humidity controlled room would be the prefect solution if we moved the office as we need the space in the workshop.
A dedicated poster printer could be an idea as we’ve a second floor, just don’t fancy running up the stairs all the time. Look g at my beer belly though that would probably do no harm.
Running avery MPI3000 for labels so not just bottom of the market. Ran 3164 previously but found it seemed to curl badly when cut into a4 sized sheets. Might be the lesser of 2 evils though.
According to Roland there’s no way to switch off that cleaning cycle on the XR which is a shame. We deal with a few companies that order thousands of labels which can literally tie up the XR for a week so over night onto the take up would have been the ideal solution. Problem definitely get worse as the weather gets colder. Hopefully the new heating system will help [emoji4][emoji4][emoji4]
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A stand-alone cutter would remove the bottle neck….. print and cut machines are good at space saving but painfully slow, you could get rid of the XR and replace it with a cutter.
The ej will happily print multiple rolls of material per day and a stand-alone cutter will be much faster than the XR.
Unless I’m missing something! Always happy to be proved wrong
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quote Alex Crosbie:A stand-alone cutter would remove the bottle neck….. print and cut machines are good at space saving but painfully slow, you could get rid of the XR and replace it with a cutter.
The ej will happily print multiple rolls of material per day and a stand-alone cutter will be much faster than the XR.
Unless I’m missing something! Always happy to be proved wrong
It’s hard to see Alex but there a GR640 cutter hiding in the corner. It has a really useful but annoying feature. When we make stickers we normally gang up as many as will fit on a a4 sheet or there abouts then add a perf line around the outside edge. This means when we remove them from the sheet we’re left with a very well presented sheet which also saves man hours by having the machine cut them. The problem is that the GR has 2 blade positions. The 1st is for normal cuts and puts the blade down on the cutting strip. When you ask it to perf you have to change the blade position which allows it to go into a channel which avoids destroying the cutting strip as your cutting right through. To keep accuracy up the max sheet length recommended is 1.5m. It’s like playing the bloody hokey pokey moving the blade about. No way to bypass this really annoying feature which is a real pain in the ass. We don’t have to change the cutting strip very often on the XR and it perfs thousands of stickers!!!
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Similar to how our unit was set up, but partitioned the print room off… there were many times we wished we could knock the wall down to get more length, then come winter be glad it we didn’t.
If it’s a concrete floor, best thing we did was put the heavy duty rubber tiles down in the workshop, in our print room carpet tiles.
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quote David Stevenson:quote Alex Crosbie:A stand-alone cutter would remove the bottle neck….. print and cut machines are good at space saving but painfully slow, you could get rid of the XR and replace it with a cutter.
The ej will happily print multiple rolls of material per day and a stand-alone cutter will be much faster than the XR.
Unless I’m missing something! Always happy to be proved wrong
It’s hard to see Alex but there a GR640 cutter hiding in the corner. It has a really useful but annoying feature. When we make stickers we normally gang up as many as will fit on a a4 sheet or there abouts then add a perf line around the outside edge. This means when we remove them from the sheet we’re left with a very well presented sheet which also saves man hours by having the machine cut them. The problem is that the GR has 2 blade positions. The 1st is for normal cuts and puts the blade down on the cutting strip. When you ask it to perf you have to change the blade position which allows it to go into a channel which avoids destroying the cutting strip as your cutting right through. To keep accuracy up the max sheet length recommended is 1.5m. It’s like playing the bloody hokey pokey moving the blade about. No way to bypass this really annoying feature which is a real pain in the ass. We don’t have to change the cutting strip very often on the XR and it perfs thousands of stickers!!!
David, how do you perf stickers? Is that an option only on the XR or can I do that in VersaWorks with my VSi?
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quote James Boden:quote David Stevenson:quote Alex Crosbie:A stand-alone cutter would remove the bottle neck….. print and cut machines are good at space saving but painfully slow, you could get rid of the XR and replace it with a cutter.
The ej will happily print multiple rolls of material per day and a stand-alone cutter will be much faster than the XR.
Unless I’m missing something! Always happy to be proved wrong
It’s hard to see Alex but there a GR640 cutter hiding in the corner. It has a really useful but annoying feature. When we make stickers we normally gang up as many as will fit on a a4 sheet or there abouts then add a perf line around the outside edge. This means when we remove them from the sheet we’re left with a very well presented sheet which also saves man hours by having the machine cut them. The problem is that the GR has 2 blade positions. The 1st is for normal cuts and puts the blade down on the cutting strip. When you ask it to perf you have to change the blade position which allows it to go into a channel which avoids destroying the cutting strip as your cutting right through. To keep accuracy up the max sheet length recommended is 1.5m. It’s like playing the bloody hokey pokey moving the blade about. No way to bypass this really annoying feature which is a real pain in the ass. We don’t have to change the cutting strip very often on the XR and it perfs thousands of stickers!!!
David, how do you perf stickers? Is that an option only on the XR or can I do that in VersaWorks with my VSi?
We can do it on the vs. Different cut line setting (code) and then it pops up on cut controls.
Should be plenty of YouTube videos for setting it up. -
Yep totally understand, it’s very annoying to have to change blade position to perf cut.
I’ve got a summa cutter which can perf cut without having to change blade position but always found it so slow I could cut them by hand quicker and get a better finish. (Never liked the slightly fluffy edge you get from the perf cut)
I now use an electric rotary trimmer which is super quick at cutting sheets of stickers.
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You need a swatch in Illustrator called "PerfCutContour". Can be any colour but the name must be typed exactly as above. I can upload the swatch panel for you to Google drive if you want it. Only have it for Illustrator through
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Thanks guys, this will make my life a heap easier. Thanks for the offer David but I should be able to work it out :thumbsup:
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quote James Boden:Thanks guys, this will make my life a heap easier. Thanks for the offer David but I should be able to work it out [emoji106]
Let me know how you get one James. We’ve been doing like this for years and have it down to a t. If you set your sheet up approx 1m long then cut them either manually or using the sheet cut feature you can stack 5 sheets on top of each other and rip 5 sets out at once
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quote David Stevenson:quote James Boden:Thanks guys, this will make my life a heap easier. Thanks for the offer David but I should be able to work it out [emoji106]
Let me know how you get one James. We’ve been doing like this for years and have it down to a t. If you set your sheet up approx 1m long then cut them either manually or using the sheet cut feature you can stack 5 sheets on top of each other and rip 5 sets out at once
Will do mate, thanks again.
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