Epson GS6000 Retro Fit

[BPI Color]

Greetings all,

I have an Epson GS6000 running with eco-solvent toners. Unfortunately, I have a materials problem with a certain scrim banner provider. Sorry, needs to remain nameless - I'm sure everyone here understands.
The weave of the scrim contains intermittent flaws. The material will run flawlessly for around 10 linear feet and then a small pucker will appear and cause a head strike. Epson has suggested a retro-fit assembly - a set of smoothing rollers added to the print head.
Does anyone have experience with this fix? Did it do it's job? Does it limit the materials you can run on the printer?
Thanks in advance.

 

[jfiscus]

Feed some material out on the input end of the machine, and make sure that the material is feeding straight. I have had better success overcoming this problem using the "high-pressure" clamp setting & using high head height. Or possibly, try a lower temp setting.

 

[J Hill Designs]

+1 pre-unwind media as it gets pulling into the printer, esp if its a fullish roll, and lower pre-print heat...

fwiw i run scrim at 20/30/50 (pre/print/post) heater settings .. not the GS6000 mind you, but solvent nonetheless

 

[signprolacrosse]

We have a GS6000 and added the rollers... last month we had a job where we had to print roll after roll of banners almost non-stop... we set the printer head to the higher height and ran the printer overnight...

cutting the end of the banner to the point like they recommend actually helped as well

 

[Letterbox Mike]

Have it, doesn't really help, but demand they install it for free, do not pay for it. We thought it did at first but it's proven worthless in the long run as far as we can tell. We bought this machine specifically to print Korographics wallpaper and have literally had zero luck with it and in 1 year have not produced a single sellable job off of it, all wallpaper has been diverted back to our Mimaki. The GS6000 frankly was not engineered to handle heavy or heat sensitive materials, there is a serious flaw in it's media handling system. Epson will throw their hands up as well. We've had a technician out several times, beyond making sure the machine is calibrated and level, they will say (actually, they are required to say) that it's faulty material and they can't help if you're not running Epson-approved material (which amounts to 3M cast vinyl and Epson photo paper and canvas).

It has nothing to do with the quality of the material either. We print 13oz Ultraflexx banner day in and day out, but have yet to successfully print more than 2-3 feet of it through our Epson. Epson says "bad material, not approved for this machine". We take the roll out and load it into the Mimaki and we can print the entire 115' of it without a flaw.

It's a great printer as long as you stick to thin media, prints beautifully then. But god help you if you need to print on anything thick. Some people have great luck with thick media on this, others have zero luck at all, seems like it's a tossup which category anyone will fall into. I'm in the zero-luck category and I'm sorry to hear you are too.

 

[ProWraps]

man this machine been getting some bad press lately on this site. im very glad we didnt buy one. its amazing because its just a 6 color mutoh as far as the chassis is concerned. im very suprised to see that is handles so differently.

 

[Letterbox Mike]

man this machine been getting some bad press lately on this site. im very glad we didnt buy one. its amazing because its just a 6 color mutoh as far as the chassis is concerned. im very suprised to see that is handles so differently.

Other than the fact that it's slow as dirt and more expensive to run that a 4-color machine (because it's got 8 colors...), it would do fine for you. Prints on wrap film beautifully.

 

[rfulford]

I too can not print Korgraphics on this machine. I also have not found a cling that the inks work well with. Other than these two issues, I have not had any problems that lowering the pre-heat would not fix. Also, I am tracking my ink costs and I average about $.21 per square foot which does not seem too high to me.

 

[BPI Color]

Can't print window clings

Set your pass to uni-directional. You'll need to use a profile with relatively low ink restrictions.

I use Onyx 7.3.2 and have been able to print beautifully on clear as well as white static/window cling.

 

[Letterbox Mike]

I too can not print Korgraphics on this machine. I also have not found a cling that the inks work well with. Other than these two issues, I have not had any problems that lowering the pre-heat would not fix. Also, I am tracking my ink costs and I average about $.21 per square foot which does not seem too high to me.

Try the Solvex cling from Fellers, it's all we've tried in it but it works fairly well. I haven't bothered to write a profile for it yet, right now we're using a canned profile for Magic GF Photo and it works decently well. A little puddling on heavy coverage but it's acceptable. Static in general is hard to print. We wrote a custom profile for it on our JV33 and it looks almost identical to the GF photo profile we're using on the Epson. You'd think static would soak the ink in fairly well but it doesn't, it just sits on top...

$.21 isn't too bad for ink consumption at all. I only tracked it for the first couple months and we were averaging about $.35-ish p.s.f.. But hat was with mostly canned profiles, we've since reprofiled the majority of our media so I'd expect to see that number drop a bit. We average about $.17 psf on the JV33 with custom profiles.

 

[rfulford]

Try the Solvex cling from Fellers, it's all we've tried in it but it works fairly well.

Thanks for the tip on the cling. I run Color Gate so no canned profiles for me. I will try to get a sample roll and give it a shot.