[Stuart Wilson]

Thats scary stuff ! Presumably sign fitter’s PLI applys to installations for a reasonable time but who would be liable if the sign was 20 years old and in poor shape, would liablity shift to the owner to maintain it after a while ?

P.S. Not sure what the relavence of Mrs Tuttons house value is in the first report ! I hate comments like that ! "Mrs Tutton lives in a £280,000 detached house…." so what !

[Stuart Wilson]

quote Chris Wool:

not a bad idea thought about it a couple of times. but
after a power cut and the power comes back on the printer will not come alive again needs the sub power button to be pressed. so keeping it live with the UPS is good, if it happens while printing the ups wont stand the heater consumption.
i would not worry if it happened in the middle of the night, it being off for several hours should not be a problem, several days will be.

Thanks Chris, never factored in the heater load ! Might have to see if about a unit that will support this consumption although I suspect it will be expensive.

Cheers !

Stu

[Stuart Wilson]

Martin it seems that every contractor that owns a digger has managed to chop a mainline line power cable in the main road through our estate at some point in time !! We’re on a huge estate so there is always lots of works going on somewhere. Its not as bad as I’m making it sound but when the power does go its always at the most inconvenient moment. As for the landlord, thats me, so no milage in that one 🙂

In regards to the printer, it was a bit chicken and egg. We’ve been buying trade print for donkeys years and will continue to do so but its those bits and bobs that we had to say no to, that I wanted to cater for. We’ve only got a VS300 but its niffty enough when it comes to the odd jobs. Lately the work has been building up a bit so if it continues to grow we’ll put in a second printer to get the capacity and ultimately employ someone to look after it all as I dont really have the time. I still find it amazing to watch it print and cut, its just so bloody clever !! Plus I always wanted one, might sound mad but I like my gadgets and this has been a load of fun to experiment with. The residual values of these printers is so great that buying it wasnt really a risk. I also have to say that dealing with the people in this industry has been a breath of fresh air. Nigel at Grapytip and Sam at Metamark have been very helpful.

[Stuart Wilson]

quote Martin Pearson:

Stuart the reason they are left on is so they can run maintenance routines to prevent ink drying & blocking the heads when not actually being used to print. 30 minutes without a power supply isn’t going to cause you any problems at all. Well unless it is printing at the time :lol1: :lol1: :lol1:

Thanks for the info Martin. I was a bit paranoid about it being turned off. Our industrial estate has occasional power cuts and I know the UPS’s on the computers have done their job but I guess I’m being a bit over cautious with the printer. I bought it on a whim and had no work at all for it but now we’re using it more and more, its my favourite toy so just wanted to look after it properly 😀

[Stuart Wilson]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I’ll be chasing down some samples to test this week.

Appreciate your help

Stu

[Stuart Wilson]

quote Chris Wool:

quote :

Metamarks highest tack vinyl MDP-H-200 comes off after a day or two.

if thats commiing off that quick i would guess application temp too low and or pressure washers

some times the thick glue types need heating

It certainly is very cold in their workshop, its as cold as it is outside but they do have some from another supplier that stuck fine, only problem they ran out of those so no backing paper to see the manufacturer name 🙁

I’ll check out Arlon as a starter.

Thanks

[Stuart Wilson]

quote Stuart Davies:

We just throw a shower curtain over ours.
stu

Ha ! loving the shower curtain idea ! B&Q here we come !

David, no fear of us not using it and we’re pretty strick on maint and cleaning. This is really very early days for us so just spending time playing with materials and settings is all part of our "self training". Every time it prints and cuts something I just think WOW ! Such a clever bit of kit.

Cheers !

Stu

[Stuart Wilson]

We’ve only had our printer a couple of weeks and we’re already starting to get rolls of material lurking around the office ! It doesnt add up to much in money terms but it sure takes up space !

[Stuart Wilson]

quote Paul.Gadsdon:

Hi

Getting over some of the issues that I originally had and I am now getting better print results. Anyway I brought 50 Meters of APSDS3007 150 micron vinyl. 😳

Besides the fact that All Print Supplies profiles for this media didnt have a HQ setting and their technical staff had never heard of RIPC profiles? I cannot cut through the vinyl and backing to do a perf cut. Well I can can just! if I set versaworks to 300G of force (max)

And at that force the end result isnt so good!

Brand new blade (cheap ebay carp), the finished result feels great and the extra thickness really feels good, its just that I have 50m of media I cant really use now as I could do with another 50g of cutting force

Dont suppose APS will take back 49m of vinyl 🙄

On another note does anyone know where I can purchase a Roland Versacamm VP300 sheet cutting blade?

Paul was it the gloss or the textured finish you were using ? I had some samples arrive today of both and was impressed but now I’m a bit concered if you’ve had cutting issues.

Was it just the perf cut that was the problem or was the contour cut an issue too ?

Thanks

Stuart

[Stuart Wilson]

I tried to download it too but it says that access is denied. I’ve got UKSG membership which I though gave me access but maybe not ?

Rob, could you confirm ?

Many thanks

Stu

[Stuart Wilson]

Over the yeras I have learnt that trying to compete with every man and his dog proved to be the best way to make no money. Pricing is a major issue in our industry so we tend to try and price at a point which gives us a reasonable margin, the customer a decent price and provide a great product backed with good old fashioned service, sounds corny but people do appreciate it.

I’m still getting my head around this new part of our business and in fact the labour cost is the biggest unknown as I expect every job to take us much longer than it would take you guys, so initially our real world margins will take a hit but over time we’ll learn and become more efficient.

I’m grateful for any input.

Thanks !

Stu

[Stuart Wilson]

Bingo !!!!

I was thinking that if we did that ourselves we’d be looking at about £40+VAT give or take a tenner depending on the customer (really good regulars we tend to keep it sweet, one off PITA’s we bump it up a bit)

Thanks Rob, thats good to know I’m working in the right ball park.

I was looking for a spreadsheet to help me with the calcs, I though I saw one on the forum but cant find it again, but I may just set one up in excel to give my team a quick calcuation for quoting. I had always factored in about 20% wastage too, does that seem reasonable ?

Thanks again.
Stu

[Stuart Wilson]

Sorry I should have been more specific with the details….

The trade supplier is a converter who supplies end user and trade, their prices aren’t the lowest but the work is good. We gave up on rock bottom priced suppliers simply because the materials were often B grade or inconsistant from batch to batch. Quality is very important to us as many of our customers are blue chip who dont want a cruddy job.

Yes the stickers are contour cut, traditionally we would have supplied them waste stripped on rolls, in most cases cut sheet is fine.

Normally we would quote this on a 3 – 5 exterior vinyl and they wouldn’t be laminated.

Hope this helps.

Thanks
Stu

[Stuart Wilson]

quote Robert Lambie:

welcome to the boards Stuart, great to have you here mate.
please also consider loading your profile picture.

Hi Robert

I’ll have a dig through my photos to find a suitable image, although I should probably warn everybody I have the perfect face for radio !! :yikes:

[Stuart Wilson]

quote Duncan Wilkie:

Welcome Stu. We have that machine

Hi Duncan

Would be interested to know what you think of the VS300 and the type of work you do on it.

We plan on printing very short run labels, decals, labels with variable data and maybe some in house promotional garments.

This type of printing is totally new to us so I’ll probably be asking lots of questions on the boards, but as we learn hopefully we can give some knowledge back in due course.

Cheers !

Stu