[Jonathan Dray]

Hi,

Is the Summa still available?

Thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

Thanks guys. We ended up using a company called NIG in the end.

[Jonathan Dray]

For internal floors we’re using a high tac vinyl and an R10 laminate. We’ve also got some 1 part stuff for more temporary things as well.

What’s like hens teeth at the minute is the external stuff, particularly R11, R12 laminate.

The slip ratings also confuse me. I was under the impression that ideally you want R11 or higher for external stuff? But I’ve seen at least a couple of 1 part products being sold specifically for external use with R9 ratings. Surely this would leave the manufacturers open to potential claims?

Equally I’ve read conflicting advice about R10 with some saying it’s fine to use outside and some not.

[Jonathan Dray]

quote Chris Wilson:

My accountant disagrees with yours.
We were told to put it through as a wage for both directors and not to exceed 17k this year (I don’t know why that’s an unusual number) and we would be fine. They’ve made the odd mistake before but it’s a big firm we use.

I’ll be doing pay roll next Tuesday so we’ll find out. But am going to put I through and if I get told off I get told off. I think they will have bigger problems really than me wanting a couple of quid.

Anyone else have an opinion on this?

[Jonathan Dray]

Well the self employed help announced last night was absolutely no help to us / small company owners / directors.

quote Wayne Fothergill:

Has anyone had a look at this loan interruption scheme yet? It doesn’t seem fit for purpose at all. No online application facility, 5 hour holds on calls to banks, 11%+ interest rates, existing customers only, some offering overdrafts instead and requiring capital guarantees. The scheme was supposed to encourage unsecured lending up to £250k yet no lender seems to be doing this at all.

How do you know this? Have you tried to apply?

[Jonathan Dray]

Tried lots of methods.

Didn’t get on with the deburring tools.

The Steeltrak we found very hard to get completely square. Particularly when trying to cut an 8ft sheet along the length. It also bends the off cut, which is fine if it’s not needed but if you’re cutting a sheet in half it’s not ideal.

Currently if we have lots of sheets to cut we use a Mafell track saw which is very accurate and gives very clean cuts but even with extraction is quite messy.

If we have only a couple to cut we use a Javelin to cut all the way through. Accurate, no mess but slightly raised edge and takes a bit of effort. We roll the edge down with a wooden wallpaper roller as someone mentioned above. This is much easier on the thinner skinned sheets.

If you’re cutting loads of this stuff you really need a CNC / flatbed cutter of some type particularly if you want to print / mount then cut.

[Jonathan Dray]

Hi David.

We’re in Letchworth, Hertfordshire.

[Jonathan Dray]

You can get bigger sheets of Dibond.

[Jonathan Dray]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread but can the Festool also cut through the ACM as well as V groove it? And if so, does it mill through it or would you switch the blade for a more normal plunge / circ saw blade? What kind of edge do you get? Thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

We use £2 per square metre for pricing calculations. In reality it’s less than that (somewhere between £1.50 and £1.75) but as Rob says that takes into account wastage, print heads, unforeseen costs etc.

[Jonathan Dray]

Price now £650.

May suit existing user of previous version wanting to save costs on upgrade.

[Jonathan Dray]

We had similar issues with our 360 but we’re using Caldera and the rip kept saying it was an interpreter error. We think the printer was printing faster than the data was arriving over the network. We found a setting in the rip to allow for “network latency” that fingers crossed seems to have corrected it. Might be worth looking into.

[Jonathan Dray]

Price now £800 ono.

Forgot to mention the software comes with drivers to run multiple printers.

Thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

OK thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

Did it arrive? Is it any good?

Thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

Interested to see how you get on with this as well.

Did you order from the states?

Things that concern me a bit…

Lots of fingers near hot elements

To me it seems like the foot pedal should be on the other side so you can push it up to a table, lay the banner out flat and let the table support the banner.

I suppose the idea is you roll the banner up in one direction and let the trough support it, then roll it the other way etc?

[Jonathan Dray]

When is the £ likely to recover though? 2 years of uncertainty until brexit happens then x amount of years after that? It may not go back to previous levels for a very long time, if ever. We’ve been looking at buying quite an expensive bit of equipment and the price increase since the vote has been staggering.

[Jonathan Dray]

Hi James,

Did you ever find a suitable policy to cover your printers? If so, do you mind sharing who with?

Alternatively, if anyone else has any suggestions it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

We have the Sign Gear one. Works well.

[Jonathan Dray]

Hi Steff,

Thanks for the reply. What material are you printing on? (Sorry if i missed it but it’s a long thread).

[Jonathan Dray]

Also, has anyone tried creating their own profiles for any of the lightbar equipped machines?

[Jonathan Dray]

Hi Steff,

I assume as you bought another machine you got over the durability issues then?

Thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

That’s what’s such a shame, when they’re on it they produce some really good stuff, well priced and pretty quick, but sometimes they really are beyond a pain in the arse. I sent them a link to a complaint thread on here (as backup for a complaint I was making) a couple of weeks ago and since then they do seem to be trying harder. Long may it continue.

[Jonathan Dray]

We struggle getting posters to dry quick enough on our Roland without standing a fan in front of the printer. We’re currently using DTEC paper from Europoint but this was the last batch they had and apparently they’re not selling it any more.

Satin drys quite a bit quicker than gloss we’ve found. If you find any, particularly if it drys quickly and is a reasonable price, let me know.

[Jonathan Dray]

quote Andrew Blackett:

we had to do far more manual cleans on the machine before we could print as the ink would quite often not fire at all. Of late we even had to use ink renew a couple of times to resolve the issue.

Calibration was a nightmare too as the indicator lines were curved rather than straight – even our engineer couldn’t sort this. It appeared the ink was either the wrong viscosity or just different as we never had a problem to begin with.

Apologies if I missed it but what machine was this on? Was it a new machine from Colourific or a retrofit?

Thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

quote Steff Davison:

At this moment in time I do not wish to express any opinions regarding colourific or my Solvent UV ink set up.

That’s worrying.

When you said earlier you waste around 2M per roll of material, did you mean 2M every time you load / unload the roll?

[Jonathan Dray]

Hi Steff,

Did you get your scratch-proof-ness sorted out?

[Jonathan Dray]

Anyone have any more updates on this, how their machines are going etc as the last post was a while ago?

[Jonathan Dray]

We have a hot and cold Seal laminator that must be almost 18 years old.

Only ever laminate cold. The only thing we occasionally use the heat for is encapsulating and it’s a pain… have to wait for it to heat up, keep the rollers moving all the time so they don’t deform, often gets unwanted adhesive on the rollers, then when finished have to wait for it to cool down before using it for anything else (takes a lot longer to cool down).

[Jonathan Dray]

As I understand it full solvent / hard solvent / whatever else you want to call it, offers the most fade resistance. UV is generally less.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard the ink that Seiko uses for the colour painter series holds up very well. But 10 years? Who knows.

[Jonathan Dray]

quote Alex Fernihough:

Hi sorry if this is in the wrong section but hopefully it will get noticed and moved if it is.

I currently own a brand new zund s3 xl1200 when cutting graphics that are totally on the bed we dont have a single issue however when a rollable graphic is longer than the bed itself and the machine needs to feed the graphics forward the final result has a noticeable step where the two halves of the cut meet.

the print and cut files are generated in onyx so there are quite a few registration dots on the file.

anyone experienced anything similar and has any suggestions for a fix please let me know.

thanks

Did you ever get to the bottom of / resolve this issue? This is exactly the reason we’re debating if a table of that length is a good idea.

[Jonathan Dray]

We’re also looking at flatbeds at the moment and the Jetrix is on our short list. We actually went to Willow Graphics last week (great guys, very helpful) with Perfect Colours (also great guys) to take a look at theirs. The model they have is the KX7D which is the 2.5M x 3M bed, double heads, white, varnish, roll to roll etc.

It looks like a good machine and comes with a 2 year warranty as standard that includes heads. But, it hasn’t been around for very long so there obviously isn’t the big user base like the Arizona or HP FB range to help gauge reliability. If anyone else has been running one for a while I’d also be very interested to hear some feedback.

We also looked at the HP and our opinion is it’s a reliable user friendly option, but when it comes to quality vs speed it’s really starting to lag behind. To get certain colours to print without banding you need to slow it right down to about 10SQM/H. The double head Jetrix will print better quality at about 30-40 SQM/H (but it’s more expensive). Depends what you’re wanting to produce with it really. I think HP have only released the 550/750 as a stopgap until the inevitable latex flatbed that must be coming, because the print quality has really not improved that much (in fact I think it’s got worse).

[Jonathan Dray]

Hi James, thanks for the reply and forwarding to Roland.

I know Roland are a good company. We bought this particular printer because it’s a simple no fuss machine backed by a decent company but this colour issue is really limiting what we can do with the machine and we’re having to move work to other machines because we just can’t trust it.

If this was you, would you allow a 5th attempt to fix this?

My opinion is that if I bought a TV for instance and every time I watched a film the picture went a strange colour, I would take it back to get it repaired / replaced. If the same fault occurred again I’d expect my money back. If it had been repaired 4 times and the same fault occurred again all within the initial 1 year warranty period, I don’t think I could reasonably be expected to accept another repair.

[Jonathan Dray]

As above really.

Versaworks does not handle transparency well.

Either flatten in Photoshop and save as a tiff or pay the cash for Caldera / Onyx Thrive.

I don’t think Wasatch has the Adobe engine but it may well handle transparency better that Versaworks. We’ve used Shiraz which I’m sure uses the Jaws engine and that handles transparencies absolutely fine.

[Jonathan Dray]

quote Gary Barker:

jonathan we had a gas blower in our works, make sure you get someone to check out the correct size you need, ours was the wrong size, to small, it was on all the time and cost us a fortune, we are now getting a boiler installed with radiators.

Will do, thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

quote Ian Johnston:

http://www.ambirad.co.uk/en/uk/products/uk-ambirad-radiant-vision

i have 2 of these second hand for sale if you want 6 meter ones,
Great job , not hard to run on Mains gas,
I bought 6 last year,

That’s the radiant model we were looking at.

How many kilowatts are they and how much are they going for?

Are you still running the other 4?

Any idea on running costs?

[Jonathan Dray]

quote Lee Reeves:

Hi Jonathan

The roof is well insulated but the wall are not the roof height is about 8m.

Sounds like a similar unit to ours. So that’s £5 per 24 hours?

Do you mind me asking who your gas supplier is?

Thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

Hi Lee,

Thanks for the reply, very helpful.

£5 a day sounds almost reasonable. Is that £5 per 24 hour then (With it running at the lower temp at night)?

How high is your ceiling? Is the roof reasonably well insulated?

Thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

We get it all the time.

Regarding reimbursement, generally speaking no supplier will cover you for "consequential loss". They’ll replace the material itself but any other materials it’s been attached to, ink, wasted time, missed deadlines, same day couriers because you couldn’t send the job out overnight, lost contracts etc won’t be covered.

It’s annoying but it’s to protect them against having to potentially pay out far more than the product they sold you was worth.

Ultimately though if they value you as a customer they should offer you something to make the situation a bit more palatable.

[Jonathan Dray]

Does Versaworks work with the basic version of Windows 8.1 or just the professional version and upwards?

Thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

Sorry I’ve been a while updating this, but other things got in the way.

We went to see the Light Bar unit on the RE640 and were generally very impressed. The guys at Colourific were really great so thanks for that Justin and Nick.

As far as we’re concerned the pros of the system include great print quality, vibrant glossy colour, instant dry, virtually no smell, great scratch resistance on par with much more expensive UV machines and various other benefits I can’t think of at the minute.

Things that concerned us is the unproven fade resistance of the ink (although I have no reason to question this other than it’s unproven), that the ink can only be purchased from one source and the problems this may or may not bring, and there was also a bit of a question mark over which RIPs were actually supported, but this may have been sorted out by now.

The biggest draw back for us was there seemed to be a shift in colour at different points in a print. For instance if you were to produce a 2 metre long print that was solid cyan, one end of the print may come out a slightly different colour to the other. I assume this is down to the consistency of speed that the print travels through the light bar, if it pauses at all while printing for instance or the auto feed at the end of the print etc. Most of the time this wouldn’t be much of an issue but if you were producing any kind of multi panelled output, pop-up stand, hoarding, exhibition stand, tiled banner etc then it could be quite a big issue. If it wasn’t for this, we’d have purchased one there and then.

We are still interested as the Mimaki alternative is twice the price. I was just wondering how you guys got on and whether this issue has popped up for you?

SteveP, did you end up purchasing?

How did your demo unit go Robert?

Thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

Thanks for the answers Justin.

I’ll see you later on today.

[Jonathan Dray]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I think it’s yourself I’m coming to see on Thursday Justin so I’m sure any questions will be answered then, but as I’m impatient and for the sake of the forum, I have some questions in addition to Fabrice’s…

————

1) Is any ventilation required? Are there any hazardous VOCs? How does the ink smell compared to standard Roland ink?

2) So if purchasing the UV640 package the first years warranty is taken care of by Selectech / Colorific?

3) Are heads included in the warranty?

4) How quick is the response time on the warranty?

5) Are there options for additional warranty after the first year and if so what is the cost for this and who fulfills it?

6) How much are replacement UV lamps and what’s the expected life?

7) What RIPS are supported? If we wanted to use Caldera is this possible?

8) How much maintenance is required? Daily? Weekly? None?

9) What happens at the end of a print run… I assume all parts of the print have to pass through the light bar. So does the machine then slowly continue to feed the media after the print has finished? How long does that process take?

10) I understand the ink is £80 per 440ml? Are there any plans to increase / reduce this price as more units are sold?

11) Are there plans for a bulk ink system?

12) Are there plans to sell packages that include other Roland printers (or other makes)?

13) Can the machine be converted back to eco sol ink?

————

Thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

Sewing machine?

[Jonathan Dray]

Thanks again for the responses.

Yeah I assumed those types of signs would have some kind of mechanism hidden inside the concrete, that’s why I asked the question. Just thought I’d check to see if someone knew of some type of system where this wasn’t required. Seems not.

To be honest I think Ashby would be perfectly happy to provide the signs with the 600mm plates (they came up with the spec). They’d just provide them with the caveat that they strongly recommend they’re also weighted down. This won’t be suitable so it’s a bit of a moot point really.

We’re just at the exploring options stage at the moment, no need for anyone to get upset about potential injuries or take legal action just yet. We’re not trying to hurt anybody, just trying to find a safe solution that meets the clients needs.

[Jonathan Dray]

Thanks for the replies.

The signs are quite big. Panel sizes…

1600mm x 2400mm (tray and post)
1600mm x 1400mm (tray and post)
1400mm x 900mm (plate and post)
(There are multiples)

Ideally, the client wants to fit these themselves with the option to move them to a new location at some point in the future. Hence, they’ve asked if we can supply them with plates for fitting to the existing floor rather than having to dig holes, pour concrete and then not have the option to move them.

I’ve had prices from Ashby but the plates they suggest are 600mm diameter and pretty expensive. Ashby also recommend that they’re weighted down as well as being fixed which is not ideal. The client has seen larger signs with much smaller fixing plates and I’m having trouble explaining this.

Below are some examples I found. Are these as they appear ie just bolted into the concrete somehow? Or is there some much larger fixing mechanism inside the concrete that can’t be seen?

http://signmakerinleeds.blogspot.co.uk/ … -sign.html

http://www.4corners.org.uk/products/totem-signs/12

http://www.totalsigns.eu/imagelib/siteb … lx_picvo0r

Thanks.

[Jonathan Dray]

A couple of the dealers we got the samples from have commercial printing departments using these printers day in day out for commercial projects and the samples we got from them had exactly the same problem.

To be honest even the official swatch book we got from the HP road show had the same problem on most of the materials.

I should add that these samples were produced on the newer L26500 not the L25500. If you take a look on the latex user group there are a few people over there complaining about this issue who moved from the older machine to the new machine. One guy in particular saying when he had the L25500 he didn’t laminate anything at all, now he’s moved to the new machine he has to laminate almost everything he produces. My guess is it’s something to do with the new glossier inks.

[Jonathan Dray]

We were very very close to buying one of the latex machines but after getting lots and lots of samples done by many different resellers, we concluded that the prints just aren’t durable enough when not laminated, particularly on dark colours. Simply running a finger nail across the surface, not even with much force, would cause the ink to come away. This is fine for stuff that’s going to be laminated like vehicle wraps etc but things like PVC banners for instance where lamination isn’t possible we could see being a real problem.

Also, there are many materials that are printable with solvent / eco solvent / UV that are not printable with latex. Roller banner material seems to be a particular issue. Yeah there are some films that may work but the options are far fewer.

Another problem with the latex machines is the size being 60 or 61 inches rather than 63 or 64 inch like most eco solvent machines. This means you can’t print a 1.5M wide banner with hems using these machines because they’re about 2 inches too small. Also a lot of PVC scrim material comes in 1600mm widths which is too wide for these machines and the next size down is normally in the 1300mm region. I’m sure there are 1520mm rolls around but again the options are far less.

Anyway, rant over. We really wanted to like these machines but just couldn’t convince ourselves. I’m sure for laminated vinyl they’re great but for what we wanted they just didn’t stack up.

[Jonathan Dray]

Cheers guys.

Is there a more fail proof method? Some kind of 2 part glue or similar?

Some of the letters will be 250mm high.

[Jonathan Dray]

Is it always on the same media? Do rolls of different media show the same problem?

On another note, what do you think of your 30600 (apart from the white blotches)? How long have you had it etc?

[Jonathan Dray]

What machine was it?

[Jonathan Dray]

Thanks for the input guys.

We’re trying to decide between this and an Epson S30600. We had a demo of the Epson Yesterday and I must say the quality of the print was really impressive. More than that though, it was so durable. We took the sample prints with us and today you literally cannot scratch the ink off. Very impressive for ink that needs no ventilation. The latex sample prints we have seem much more delicate in comparison and can be scratched quite easily with a finger nail.

We’re just trying to decide on whether having better scratch resistance outweighs having to wait for the prints to gas off and also having to clean the machine more regularly.

Just not sure.

[Jonathan Dray]

Thanks for the response Andre, very helpful, I was starting to think I was the only one here.

When you say that the print quality of the PVC banners is lighter, what do you mean? Lighter in colour? Less saturated? Not as well cured?

Also are there any products you still choose to print on your eco solvent machines? And if so, why?

Thanks again.

Anyone else have any input (200 hits and 1 response)?