What do you do with yours?

[Carrie Brown]

Your Title of this post reminds me of cadburys creme eggs 😀 You know “How do you eat yours?” 😆

Anyway sorry, gone completely off track, lost the plot, Sorry!!!! Just had to say it for some reason!? Im going mad like you now Dewi!

Anyway back to your subject – sorry again 😀

[Robert Lambie]

dewi! when i said this machine will definately make you money i wasnt meaning like this! 😮

😆 😆 😆

just joking mate.. ill try reply better a little later. working on stuff in the background here 😉

[Bill Dewison]

Bizarrely, that is what I was going to put as a subject 😉 Just thought it might lead to ppl asking how they’re s’posed to eat a Roland product 😆 😆

Cheers, Dewi

[Phill Fenton]

I use mine mainly for printing labels and signs that are too small to weed as well as muticoloured (rendered) images and photographs.

It’s ideal for relatively small multicoloured signs and for printing bitmap and jpg images. – Only today I did a van for a customer that involves some intricate five coloured logos. These I now print (I used to do them in vinyl but it was very time consuming) using spot colours. I also did a car last Friday to promote a competion to win the car – the sponsors logos were printed from jpeg files supplied (rather than recreating the logos in vector format then painstakingly creating them in vinyl in a number of different colours). Lorraine Kelly (from GMTV) was photographed with the car for promotional purposes but unfortunatley I never got to meet her 😥

Large printed images are uneconomical on these machines but “one off” jobs and label runs are ideal. Safety signs are another good use e.g warning signs (black text on a yellow background) are economicaly produced by printing black spot colour onto yellow vinyl then contour cutting.

Finally – dont forget to create a “signwork by ….” sticker to put on all the work you put out. It’s amazing how much work comes in from these little stickers. Even body repair shops will phone up asking for replacement lettering for a van they’re repairing if you’ve remembered to place these on all the vehicles you’ve signed up – never mind the refferals you get from people seeing the work you’ve done.

Also – it’s handy as a back up cutter if your main cutter breaks down.

[Rodney Gold]

We never print anything more than 4″ x4″ on ours , however it is busy all day long printing badges and trophy/medal inserts. (and the occasional sticker , tho now with the soljet that has stopped on the PC60)
The secret of this machine is to “convert” the output.
For example we print a 1″ diameter circle and dome it (clear epoxy) and then insert it into a spun cast medal we make , we charge 50 each pence for minimum qty of 100 of these (has the logo , sports event etc) The cost of production assuming 60 quid per sq meter is about 10 pence each at worst.
Badges are a huge money spinner , apply a printed graphic to a substrate (like brass or engraving laminate etc) dome the whole thing , stick a pin or a magnet on the back and you have a badge that will sell for 3-4 quid with a production cost of less than 50p.
Often you can get away with large graphics by doing what you can in normal vinyl and just adding a die cut smaller digiprint graphic.
We used to do a lot for the home cosmetic industry , lots of product labels. Also used to do a lot for the local gas industry , they needed tons of labels to indicate the gas and its flow direction on pipes.
A good way of marketing the product is to send out a die cut peel off label with your details and some useful info ppl can put on the side of their montors etc – like the local emergency nos or in our case , when all our public holidays were and what they were (we have about 12 here)
We have a chap that uses us extensively for a bloody good idea product , he sells stickers with ppls name , id no , medical aid details , blood group and alergies for sticking onto stuff like cars , race cars , dirt bikes , helmets etc. He gets the medical aids and other allied companys to sponsor them.
We charge him 2 quid for a 3″ x 2″ decal (expensive cos of inputting the detials), he orders 100 at a time , perhaps you could start that type of scheme where you are?

[Bill Dewison]

I see myself using the machine in much the same way you do Phill. Along similar lines, avoiding all those diddy weeding jobs, printing off one off stickers and mini label runs. The ‘sign work by’ sticker is a cool one, saves alot of weeding (why did I pick such a long business name? 😕 ). I printed some stickers on red and yellow vinyl today, exactly as you said, made really smart safety stickers. Do I get the feeling you like Lorraine Kelly btw? 😉

Excellent idea with the doming Rodney. Is it a hard process? What type of extra equipment would be required to do that type of work? The health details is a good one. I thought of something similar to promote my business, a list of useful numbers with my telephone number on the bottom, but I doubt mine would save any lives.

I’m still at the playing stage with the machine atm, I sit in the workshop with a brew, pressing buttons, reading the manual and printing off samples. My 10 minute brew break has turned into 1/2 hour now 😆 Find it a fascinating tool though, the amount of applications for it seems to be huge.

Cheers, Dewi

[Kev]

Dewi, regarding the doming
we use our pc60 to print and cut 1″ trophy/ key fob centres and then apply doming soloution, which we get from acuflow its a 2 part glass clear flexible resin mixed to a ratio of 1:1. The only extra equipment we have is as follows

PVC Gloves (messy stuff, well it is when i use it 😆 )
50ml Syringe
2 50ml plastic measuring pots
and a bowl of hot water to stand the resin filled measuring pots in (this really thins the resin out so you can get into all corners of odd shapes with ease, but gives it a little less working time).

[Bill Dewison]

Thank you for that Kev 😀 I just did a search on the Acuflow on the boards to see if the supplier details were in a back post, and there is a full demo in the Demonstrations section on this very subject!! 😮 How did I miss that one?!? 😳 😳

Cheers, Dewi

[Rodney Gold]

The guys that supply those 2 part doming kits are VERY expensive. Doming resin is about 10 quid per kilo and a kilo covers 1000 sq inches.
Im sure I posted a whole thing about doming here , chapter and verse!! – Try search for it dewi.