why is my color CAMM PC-50 not printing properly please?

[Chris Wool]

quote :

as there were “see through gaps” in the ribbon

sounds like the cart has already been used ?

looking at the clear gaps on the tape does that appear to be what you wanted or something completely different meaning its been used.

chris

[Aaron]

The clear gaps in the tape do appear to be what I wanted printing.
When the tape was wound before it went into the plotter, the parts of the tape that were exposed were unused (no gaps), though when it came out, the clear gaps did APPEAR to be similar to what I wanted printing.

I also had the same problem with different colours, so I don’t think it was that the tape had been used.

[Aaron]

Okay, sorry for the double post.
I managed to get the plotter printing now, but the printing quality isn’t very good.

I cleaned the head (using a cotton wool bud, as we no-longer have the head cleaner, or head cleaning sheet), and also cleaned the cleaning pad on the plotter itself the best I could.

But the results were still pretty patchy.
I did a self test and scanned the result (any dirt on the picture is down to the scanner, rather than the plotter).

Anyone have any ideas how I can improve this?
Do I need to buy a new print head (If so, does anyone know where I can buy a print head for a Color CAMM PC-50?), or do I keep printing and hope that it gets better?

Thanks,
Aaron.

[Chris Wool]

hi
if the wax ribbon printed fine then the head is clean and working ok.
this looks like it was printed by the resin carts and possibly two problems.
1 change make of vinyl mactac 9800 was good image perfect 5700 also excellent. should be gloss as well.

2 the head voltage requires resetting. need a special connector for the 5000 and 50 thou and a high quality volt meter.

i am afraid that the 50 and 5000 were not that good at printing when new so a older one ?

the wax can be used aslong as you over laminate for any abrasion resistance and will fade quite quickly.

chris

[Gavin MacMillan]

Doesn’t really look like the same issue but have you tried cleaning the vinyl with isopropal before printing? Could be a greasy residue if it’s not a print material you are using.

G

[Aaron]

Perhaps I could have been clearer.
When I said that the wax ribbons were printing, they were giving the same results as the other cartridges…

That picture taken was an example to show how all of the printing looks.
However, upon printing more and more, the quality does seem to be slowly improving, so maybe the printer head is cleaning as it prints more.

We were also printing on mactac vinyl. 🙂

[Eddie Taylor]

There is a small rubber roller at the bottom of the leading edge of the print head. Is this damaged?

[Aaron]

quote Eddie Taylor:

There is a small rubber roller at the bottom of the leading edge of the print head. Is this damaged?

I’ve just checked the rubber roller. It was damaged (a bit frayed around the edges with a few small holes in the middle) and was causing poor printing.

Do you know where I could get a replacement roller, or an alternative way to fix it? I’ve rang Roland and they said they don’t stock any of the parts for this plotter (due to it’s age, apparently).

Thanks everybody for your advice and help, I really appreciate it. 🙂

[Eddie Taylor]

Go to a fishing tackle shop, and ask for some pole elastic, or rubber tube that fits around the bottom of a fishing float. This is what I had lying around, and it worked really well. Obviously you only need a tiny bit, but give this a try.
Cheers

[Aaron]

Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll have to give that a try tomorrow.

It sounds a much better idea than what I just tried (a small bit of carefully cut sellotape wrapped around the roller), even that improved the printing results to almost perfect from the very bad state it was in yesterday morning (believe it or not, the printing results I scanned up here were among the more perfect ones.. it was actually a lot worse at first, with more of the graphics not printed than what was on the vinyl).

I was afraid after Roland said they no-longer stocked parts that the plotter itself might never be used for printing again.

It’d been a long-standing problem that actually just had the plotter gathering dust for the best part of 7 years. – The person that worked in my position before assumed it was broken beyond repair and it was just pushed to one side. After I’d spent a lot of time getting used to the other machines I decided that it would be a good idea to try and revive the color camm and with results looking almost perfect now, I’m glad I did. It’s already been fun just playing around with it.

We’re also looking into buying a newer cutting/printing machine to supplement the existing setup (Roland Color CAMM PC-50 and a CAMM-1 PRO (CM-500)). Does anybody have any suggestions of a suitable updated model (with similar capabilities). It doesn’t necessarily have to be top of the line or a Roland product.

Thanks again for all your help!