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Bad UV printer and taking advantage of the Capital may screwup our business

KevSign

New Member
Sorry, I got the post because I was so sad on this happened to us.

We bought 5'x10' UV Flatbed printer from Stratojet Shark and Finance with MMP Capital.

Here are problems we have and sharing for a small company if try invest for the business.

Stratojet Shark 5'x10' with Ricoh Gen6 but the salesman told me it special print-head from Ricoh no one had it. I hope he is right!
But the printer print very bad quality, it was head alignment problems, after get done, but the print was still not good, the dots was a lot of noise not smooth compared to Ricoh Gen5.
After we learn with CMYK Engineering, they told us the waveform is not good on the Ricoh Gen6 needs to adjust or calibrated. Stratojet agreed but took them 5 weeks no fix and if fix needs a special scanner to scan the test print.
Besides, the printer gets overheated then our print is not dry, we throw away a lot of material with this happen. Ink drop middle print too very bad because negative pressure ink keeps dropping.
In 4 months we lost a lot of time, labor, and jobs too. We were threatened to sue for this lost properly $50,000 in the headache we got. But they pick up the printer end of Nov 2021.
They return the money of $125,000 to the bank later in January 2022 from here we get burned from MMP Capital.

The MMP Capital asking us to make sure they get money in full, and then they will give us money to buy another printer but they want us to re-apply for the loan again. I said no because we did not stop payment with bad printers.
We want them just pay for the equipment then we continue payment and need a printer to print and pay the bank. After we found the printer, took them over 5 days not to get back to us but they already get $125,000 back. I told them that MMP Capital cannot help them return the principal, we were okay to lost almost $4,000 interested. MMP Capital guy told me NO my loan cannot cancel they cannot get the full money back and only give me back $5,000 of $11,500 principal. I say noway and I had to take to small claim for this. This guy from MMP Capital piss off and loud on the phone with me and told me to go ahead.

To me, the small business in this bad inflation, be careful when investing to buy the printer and the Capital company willing to help or crew us for the money.
Money is not easy to make for all of us, much small print shops already closed in 2020, and many large shops may be on the way to closing too if the rent gets too high.

The Stratojet ask us to pay them $7,200 for restocking fees, I told them no, your printer already damage our business, why we pay for it. But we pay the $2,500 for feeling bad about this problem.

We are now buying 2 more EFI Vutek LX3 and GS3250 LX pro with Ultra drop, we already had GS3250 LX Pro Ultra Drop and GS5250 LX Pro 16FT, 2 Latex 3200 and 3600.

The CMYK Engineering support us successful when we still have OCE 350, 660XT. We buy their ink for all our Vutek, and services, Sergey is a very smart technician.

We have used OCE 660 Parts and an LED is good for OCE.
 
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Pauly

Printrade.com.au
Now we wait for Stratojet & Zach Starr to comment...

Anyway, that is terrible. No one likes buying a lemon. At least you got to return it and get a full refund.
I wouldn't have paid the restocking fee but it's probably in the contract...

As for MMP asking to pay them back and re apply. It's quite normal. As the loan is for that particular piece of equipment. I understand the headache for doing a loan, but it is what it is for that.

As least you got somewhere as many people, some even on this forum have bought lemons and still have them today as they weren't able to get their money back etc.
And that CMYK Engineering were also able to help you out.

There are so many UV printers to choose from, it gets hard to know the good from bad.
 

richsweeney

New Member
I am sorry about what happened to you. We bought our 4x8 in July, and have had very little to complain about. I agree with the above, you could have easily been out the full refund.
If you anyone from Stratojet is reading this, we are still waiting for the onyx driver so we can take advantage of our $3500 software investment btw.
 

balstestrat

Problem Solver
I am sorry about what happened to you. We bought our 4x8 in July, and have had very little to complain about. I agree with the above, you could have easily been out the full refund.
If you anyone from Stratojet is reading this, we are still waiting for the onyx driver so we can take advantage of our $3500 software investment btw.
They have a new model or something? All these you can download from Onyx right now.

388fbeog8rje.jpg
 

White Haus

Not a Newbie
Sorry to hear about your poor experience Kevin, that sounds awful.

I'm glad to hear that you somewhat got the issue resolved and are moving forward with some different units.
 

Mikee

New Member
Sorry to hear about all your problems with machines and finance..
You should of 1st bought what you know..! like EFI
We only have EFI (LX3, GS5000R, QS2000) and Mimaki UV x3 and Solvent x2 here.
The only thing we don't have is, 1600 wide WHITE UV Mimaki that would of been a good tool...
 

CMYKENGINEERING

Merchant Member
Stratojet agreed but took them 5 weeks no fix and if fix needs a special scanner to scan the test print.

A scanner? There is special equipment required to create the waveform. (What is a Waveform article)

A waveform is a pulse timing firmware that is supposed to be compatible with the printer software. Unfortunately, a lot of Chinese assemblers who build their printers under a variety of brand names are based on DIY board kits. BYHX and UMC (Royal) are the two most well-known companies in the DIY field. UMS Royal is the cheapest one. The board's quality is pretty solid but the software. I won't use a bad word to describe it. Literally, it's built on pieces of stolen/copied code from a bunch of different software, even more - some libraries are written in different code languages. The technical debt in the Royal software development isn't fixable, no matter how many patches they would be going to use in the future.

So, long story short. The original RICOH waveform creator module does not support the .rhdat format that Royal software uses, so it's kind of mission impossible to complete even if we imagine Royal has bought the creator module from Ricoh. For sure, there is no certification done for Stratojet ink as a compatible inkset (I guess it is Nazdar relabeled ink) - which doesn't make a big difference.
 

PICKONUS

New Member
We've been running our Mutoh Performancejet 2508UF with no problems since day one. Excellent printer.
Hello Dave, Nice to E-meet you, quick question, since you have the same printer we just bought 6 months ago, I would like to ask you a question, as we started to use it we noticed there was ink overspray on the inside of the head, In a couple of weeks all the internals were covered in what it looks like cyan ink, I reached to the vendor and they contacted the manufacturer, Mutoh says this is normal and that this always happens to this type of printers, the pictures attached are from like 3 months ago, the internals are now completely cover and sticky, so much that the cyan color is now coming out to stain the railing and the moving mechanisms, ( in the pictures you can still see green circuit boards, they are fully covered in blue by now ) could you please let me know if this is something that is happening to you as well?
IMG_3643.JPEG
IMG_3642.JPEG
 

Django

New Member
Hello Dave, Nice to E-meet you, quick question, since you have the same printer we just bought 6 months ago, I would like to ask you a question, as we started to use it we noticed there was ink overspray on the inside of the head, In a couple of weeks all the internals were covered in what it looks like cyan ink, I reached to the vendor and they contacted the manufacturer, Mutoh says this is normal and that this always happens to this type of printers, the pictures attached are from like 3 months ago, the internals are now completely cover and sticky, so much that the cyan color is now coming out to stain the railing and the moving mechanisms, ( in the pictures you can still see green circuit boards, they are fully covered in blue by now ) could you please let me know if this is something that is happening to you as well?
View attachment 161548 View attachment 161547
From the look of it, that printer is manufactured by Flora. So that is normal. If you don't have white ink and if the inks are not too agressive, you can turn down the clean spray/misting to lower this overspray of ink.
Will it fry the board or cause them to overheat ehhh likely not. I'd be more worried about the connectors breaking down and wires coming loose than anything. Other than that, it's just a sore sight.
 

johnnysigns

New Member
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. The Vanguard I'm familiar with has the same overspray from the head misting functions with no ill effects on performance.
 
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