Edge Troubles

[sue]

: i'm hoping someone can help me out there
i have an edge II--seems to print fine except for
spot color registration--it's off by almost 1/16"
usually to the right and slightly down????--i've tried
everything i can think of--let the material sit, heat
settings,sprockets clean-----???

anyone have any ideas??--it's driving me crazy--i
have been pulling my hair out on a couple jobs that
just won't print right

 

[jimdes]

First post . . . Welcome Sue!

I'm sure Fred has input on this one.

 

[iSign]

Usually the worst registration problems are a result of the different tension between a freshly opened cartridge with almost no spent foil & another color cartridge that is well on it's way to running out. Something about the way the foils rolls off a fatter roll vs. a thinner one changes where it lands on the vinyl. If you try the job again with 2 foils that are both new, or both almost spent... this may solve the problem.

If not, I would move the offending color 1/16th to the left & up just as a band-aid solution to get the job out while you look into other possible causes.

 

[Fred Weiss]

Doug has it right Sue. The problem is well documented and GSP is even advertising that their new Edge FX does a better job with color to color registration. The problem is made worse due to the fact that Omega does not print underneath the vector path ... only within the vector, so there is always a hairline that goes unprinted when one spot color is touching another.

I have a label job I rerun regularly which is a black rectangle with an Olympic Blue rectangle above and below and all of which has a white border. I always end up doing a test print, eyeball the error that day and then go back and move the black area a few thousandths one way or the other to get it dead on.

Other possible solutions are to choke and spread the touching colors to compensate for the registration error, set a trap line, use a stroke, or print as CMYK which will usually eliminate all such problems.