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HP 260 inconsistent drying and curing temps

Asuma01

New Member
On heavy ink runs (black, brown, dark red) the drying is inconsistent. Half of the print will be cured on the right side while the other half is still uncured and oily on the left side. I'm sure others have to be experiencing this. Anyone have a work around? Its seriously annoying.
Why is there such a temperature difference from one side of the printer to the other?
 
What class of media are you printing onto when this problem is occurring (SAV, paper, PVC Banner)?
Are you using pre-built media profiles or custom-built?
What pass count are you printing when this problem is occurring?

HP Latex printers (L2 Series specifically) dry the ink through the application of heat and airflow in two places, in the print zone, and in the curing zone. Ink drying is an environmentally induced reaction. The print heater is responsible for the evacuation of the water in the ink, and the curing heater is responsible for the remainder of the reaction (curing).

There are a number of things that can be done to more fully dry and cure the ink, but they mostly center on tuning the environment in the printer. They include:

1) Print at a higher pass count - This gives the heaters more time to do their job.
2) Invoke a pause between the passes - There is a firmware-based tool called Inter-Pass Delay that gives a bit more time (typically a fraction of a second) for the heaters to do their respective jobs.
3) Increase the Temp Settings - This can be helpful in some cases, though there are limits to the temp ranges, and some media can react negatively to too much heat.
4) Reduce the volume of ink - This is something that is best done when creating a new media profile for the media that is being printed.
 

Asuma01

New Member
Hey thanks. We do most of our printing on 3M IJ35c-10.
More passes and a delay sound good. I'll give that a shot.
 

Kwiksigns

wookie
we used to have one and we had this problem. We tried everything before calling hp. They had me send some log the printer makes and one of the heating elements was bad.
 
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