HP 560 with Oracal 3651 Clear - Need help with calibration / profile

[FactorDesign]

We've had a pretty good experience so far in the time we've had our HP Latex 560. It certainly does some weird things now and again and wastes a lot of media on loading, but otherwise has been a huge improvement over our very old Epson S40675.

Currently I'm working on 3 jobs that need to be printed on Oracal 3651 Clear. Our sales rep and install tech made us a profile for this media that has worked until recently, but I can't get it to replicate a tan wall paint color. I was wondering if it trying to color calibrate it as a clear media on a white backer that doesn't have the best white point would throw it off, so I decided to start over from scratch so I downloaded the media profile directly from Oracal and loaded into the latest version of Onyx Thrive.
The profile from Oracal looks great when I printed the saturation tests up to 120% with 20% optimizer, but when I try to print an actual job, any dark colors like pantone 295c will be oily vertical stripes and the ink will smear right off with a paper towel.

I'm also curious as to how to really manage color matching with clear medias. Other than printing huge amounts of color swatches and trying to adjust by feel, I'm at a loss. I think the poor white point of the backer paper would throw the print off enough that it won't get close to matching if I run through the calibration and icc profile creation on the printer.

 

[balstestrat]

Turn heat up to get rid of those smears. It just isn't quite done drying.
If you have a better white background, print the calibrations and mount the vinyl to that then calibrate with external meter. But how often do you really mount clear on top of white? So you never really have that situation in real uses.

 

[FactorDesign]

Turn heat up to get rid of those smears. It just isn't quite done drying.
If you have a better white background, print the calibrations and mount the vinyl to that then calibrate with external meter.

I'll give cranking the heat up a try. I did try upping it by 10 but that didn't have any result. Extra passes caused the colors to go totally nuts without recalibrating the color (which I think would just be worse with the on board scanner)

External meter - Yes, I'd like to have one of those. I don't currently and I don't think it's in the budget at the moment. One of our biggest sources of income was building trade show booths, and you know what 2020 has done to that market. I'm glad to still be working honestly. My girlfriend was out of work for 7 months and is just starting back at a new place today (at a pretty significant pay reduction)