-
Nozzle drop out whilst printing
As per title we are getting ever so slight (1or 2 nozzles dropping out) when printing a few meters every now and again. To stop this being a 1000 word post I’ll keep it brief
Roland VS 540 – Eco sol max 3
All nozzles on head are fine, even if you do a test print immediately after the drop out
Cleaned everyday- no lumps of old ink on the wiper blade
Warm, no drafts, no media rippling, no head strikes.
Software (versaworks) is up to date
Calibration is spot on for each media type.
Dampeners were replaced few months back but I would of thought it would be much more than this.
No hair or dust near the head.Seems to be magenta only. Had to give up printing some red background boards that were 3m as by the end it look like cord jeans.
Today it was on the grey, but not the navy or bright green of the print, just a small section of grey and we must be talking 1 or 2 nozzles.
Option to suggestions before it gets worse or I leave it printing a big run over night to find it fit for the bin in the morning.
As soon as it stops printing that job everything is there. It doesn’t even pump ink into the dampners or clean itself. Everything is the same except I have cancelled the print. It’s bizarre.
-
6 Replies
-
if it was my machine (pick out what you think) sounds like ink starvation or air a poor sealing cap will lead to these results
agitate the cart 1 med clean catch the waste ink should be just about tea spoon full if not recheck sealing of cap.
if all good then print at a slower speed approx half see if improvement.
when you cancel a print it will stop printing (time to recuperate) then do a setup note just before the head goes to find the rollers it goes back a forth a bit over the cap this is a all nosel firing squirt to prime ready to print. so if you do a test print the fault is hidden. -
Hi Chris,
I was wondering about the cap top. There has been dribbles if ink round the edge from time to time.
It’s under cover with Roland so will call them after Easter break. Didn’t want them coming all the way up for nothing but sounds like it could be over my head and need a bit of tinkering
-
We’ve got this very same issue on our XC540. It became obvious on a print run of 20 large navy blue banners. All started out looking good but after a short while the dense navy flood print became very stripey. Stop the print and do a test print and it revealed about 25 per cent magenta nozzles missing. If you re-set the machine, the test pattern comes back to 100%, and it’s like that when you start.
An engineer even looked at that for us, swapped the head, swapped ink lines, nothing cured it, we had to conclude no one had the answer. It became obvious that it was better to do one large print at a time, rather than rip a run of banners or vinyl prints at the same time, as that seems to be where you tend to see it the most.
I wonder if static plays a part in this because one week ago I had plastic media that I couldn’t print on because the ink was over spraying into white areas, and now with the temperature having gone up a bit/humidity etc, it works fine. I can’t see how static would cause a nozzle drop out as such, but then again, it did render a couple of our print medias completely useless over the winter so who knows?
-
Interesting Paul. Not called Roland yet as pretty flat out and just finish my 14 hour shift (rolls eyes and sighs).
It is on top of carpet which I once got told can create static. Just about to move and as much as I love the smell of new carpet maybe Lino in the print room would be better..
-
Might be worth adding a magenta stripe down one side as maybe it’s the magenta drying out as it’s not being fired whilst printing all the blue…
-
Hmm.. If the magenta head was drying out whilst not being fired, why would it just be that head doing it – or why didn’t it stop when changed for a new head etc?
It really is a mystery. We were thinking of changing all the ink lines but when we swapped the magenta line over to another head it didn’t do it, but continued to drop out on the magenta head even with a different ink line.
What I could never figure out is why it’s always the magenta that drops out and never anything else. It does seem to be a high speed/ink starvation issue of some kind, but it’s intermittent
