Vehicle colour stickers

[Gordon Forbes]

I to have a PC600 and for printing on to vinyl you need resin tapes.
I have only used Roland ones so far and you need a vinyl that you can print on. I got this from Victory but I’m sure that many other suppliers will have the same.

From what I can gather Roland reccommend Mactac 9800 for printing on.

You will need to clean the viynl before you print on it to remove production residue and any dust etc, if not you will get white spaces on the print. Plus it can destroy the head if dust gets on it while printing (Use Isopropanol available at proper chemists and a lint free cloth so it doesn’t leave any remnants its self)

I personally use Signlab to print from and have no problems contour cuting from it quite straight forward.

Do a small print first with the colours in the print to see how they match the original artwork as there are big differences between RGB and CMYK when printed and what you see on the screen

You will get banding on solid colours due to the nature of the printhead this cannot be avoided but can be minimised and it less noticeable if printing a bitmap from my experience. If it is really noticable try turning the print orientation this may reduce the noticable effect.

For outside application it will need to be laminated either by using material (I have no experience doing this yet) or using frog juice or similar spray product (basicaly a lacquer) which seals the surface same as a laminate, again I have limited experience but it is what I have used so far and from what I gather one fairly good coat and thats it don’t give multiple coats. This also can be obtained from Victory.

Don’t try to print any lines that are less than 0.008 (or 0.08 I’m not sure which) that are vertical in relation to the printhead as this tends to snap the ribbon as the print head prints it a bit like the heat sealing thing on plastic bags was the effect that was described to me and this does happen if you are not aware of it. Doesn’t always happen but this is the common reason if it does.

You will also need to countour cut the image the easiest way is either a square or circle oval etc round the picture or if not too complex round the actual image itself. I don’t know how you would do this as you don’t say what software you’re using if illustrator, corel etc you need to make a line round it and tell the software to make it a cut line and it needs to be 100% of a colour (usually magenta as far as i can discern but can be yellow etc etc but not a colour contained it the drawing for obvious reasons.

As to cost the general consensus is that it will cost “YOU” £4 to print an A4 size sheet using Roland cartridges (Print one a supplier from here also do them at a fraction of the cost of originals).

On the Roland web site there are posts that Roland suggest for the output for RCC (Roland Colour Choice) and I would strongly suggest that you spend a couple of hours reading these as they are very informative and helpfull even though the site is a bit sluggish at times.

Well I hope this helps you

ps a bit more info in what you have (software etc what you are printing etc would be helpfull).

Goop.

Roland have a good web page at http://www.rolanddga.com/boards/detail.asp? about the colourcamm and you can find a lot of information there.

Do a search on this site and a lot of information can be found on this site as well.

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[john6512]

Forbie

We use CorelDraw 11 – creating the correct artwork and contours are not the issue, we do this on a daily basis. However, external vinyl is not our area of expertise – I would not know where to start -what vinyl is compatible with resin inkd of the PC-600.

Best wishes

John

[J. Hulme]

Standard white vinyl

[Chris Wool]

john

mac tac 9800 white gloss is the best off the shelf for thermal printing
there is specialized stuf but failur rate small enough to warrent less in vinyl price i have been using it for over 8 years for thermal printing and tried the others and gone back to mac tac its got a grey backing as well so it is easy to see when weeding

chris mrsticker