Liquid laminate on UV curable prints?

[DoubleDown]

We use ClearShield original for most of our UV prints (couple 9840's) but the one thing we have noticed and talked to ClearStar about is on some substrates the liquid will actually "soften" the ink and pull the graphic off the substrate easily.

Has anyone played around with different liquid lams on UV curable inks and found out any issues or good things?

Thanks,

Chris

 

[ScottyDoo]

This is a topic we were looking into for our 9840 as well, but haven't come to any conclusions. We didn't want to have to use a liquid lam on our prints.

Have you found the lam to hide the bidi (lawnmower) pattern from the 9840? That's the only reason we've even considered liquid lam.

PS: I got your message and will send you an email here shortly. I actually have a ColorSpan tech coming in, so we're hurrying to get our jobs caught up so they can work.

 

[DoubleDown]

We have found that the lawnmower effect will disappear obviously with uni-directional but you need to also make sure lamps are at the right setting. We have played around with ours a ton and found that if you only use one lamp, like user side, it will produce a nice print and if you just use the service side lamp, it will produce a "glossy" print.

Take a test print decent size on foamcore and run the same print bi-directional with each lamp and you will see an amazing difference.

We have found that a regular lam will definitely hide this effect, which shows up more prominently with darker colors. The liquid lam is great, you just have to watch it on certain materials where the adhesion isn't the greatest. But what we have really found out is that we spray all our liquid lams on because the rolling puts down too much lam in our opinion which makes the inks "soft". The spraying is really easy to do and you can control the look and dries a lot faster.

If the calibration is setup correctly on teh 9840 for each material, your lawnmower effect will go down significantly so talk to your tech about that. It's the same principle with roll machines is that you have to do a media feed/media comp adjustment for every single media you put it the machine because of thickness, weight, etc so why wouldn't you have to do one with the flatbed? Unless you have a stationary bed, then it would only make sense that different materials are going to require different media rates to ensure the best look, etc.

Talk to you soon and feel free to email or call anytime,

Best,

Christian
chris@thecsco.com
513-241-2726

 

[ScottyDoo]

We run 98% of our stuff uni-directional with one lamp as the bi-directional pattern is unnacceptable. We're having the tech come in because we have strange anomalies, where even running uni we hve inconsistent patterns. We even had a couple 8x16 MDO jobs that were rejected. They looked great in the shop, but out in the light was another issue.

Check out this pic, this job was run in production, uni-directional.

 

[DoubleDown]

Yeah, that is nooo good at all and you should NOT be having those issues at all. Our worst bi-directional does not look even like that. You should easily be able to run bi-directional with both lamps (what they recommend) and have really good looking prints. We only run the one lamp when we have to or have darker prints. If you threw a matte lam on that though it would definitely have helped big time, just as a heads up.

I'm sure you guys are going to but do not let them leave or give you any run around without that being fixed because even our billboard mode doesn't look like that.

And I'm sure you guys do this also, but we clean our machines thoroughly per their cleaning schedule every Friday because they can tell if the machine has been purged and cleaned everyday which means they can come back to you and say "you haven't been taking care of your machine, so there's nothing we can do to help you" just as a heads up.

Let me know how stuff goes.

Chris

 

[SignManiac]

Wow talk about timing being everything. I just came here to post a thread specifically about using ClearShield on top of our ColorSpan prints (spraying) and wanted to know what others have found.

We've been using a two part automotive acrylic clear coat without any problems but I want to get away from solvent based materials.

Does anybody have any work that has been out for several years? Does the clear yellow? What about cracking of lifting off of the surface?

Thanks in advance for any opinions.

 

[SignManiac]

I forgot to add, are you guys using the solvent based or water based clear shield?

thanks

 

[UVchick]

Ran a UV Pressvu 180 and a Uv liquid Neschen-Accutech coater for a couple of years. I thought the liquid coater did pretty well.
It did help some with the bidirectional uv lamp curing tracks.
Some orange pealing effects on a couple of batches of the coating.

We did run into adhession issues between the coating and the UVink when Vutek reformulated the UVink. The liquid coating would just peal right off of the prints even after sitting a couple of hour after running through the uv curing lamps on the coater. It took a little bit for Neschen to reformulate their coating to work with the new ink (part of the reason was the 180's newer ink was also getting "tweaked").

I haven't worked with ClearShield, but could there be a chemical conflict between your ink and coating?

 

[DoubleDown]

SignManiac,

Do NOT use solvent inks with solvent prints or UV inks...you only want to use water based lams with these types of products. Plus it's much less toxic.

Yeah, I was wondering about the flat UV coaters and how those worked with everything because we were thinking about getting one. Was this the UV coater that has the UV light to cure it when it comes out?

 

[National Sign Co. - Print]

Liquid Lam

We have the Nescehn(Seal) Accucure 60. This is a UV curable liquid lam machine. Very easy to use and can switch between matt and gloss lam in minutes. Makes prints look awesome even in full speed production modes.

In my opinion and experince in this Flatbed market is aside from a Flatbed printer the other 2 key elements to success are a liquid lam machine and a Zund or MGE die cut machine. They are used just as much as our Jeti 3150.

 

[UVchick]

In my opinion and experince in this Flatbed market is aside from a Flatbed printer the other 2 key elements to success are a liquid lam machine and a Zund or MGE die cut machine. They are used just as much as our Jeti 3150.

I agree, The Zund or The Kongsberg compliment very nicely any set up even if you don't have a liquid lam machine.

 

[ksc]

ksc

Please check out my other threads (under flat bed printers) about hp colorspan I know of 3 other sign co,s that are returning their hp/colorspan printers with the same print problems as in the picture i have talked with all of them color span can't fix it only replace the units with new ones.......

 

[ksc]

We run 98% of our stuff uni-directional with one lamp as the bi-directional pattern is unnacceptable. We're having the tech come in because we have strange anomalies, where even running uni we hve inconsistent patterns. We even had a couple 8x16 MDO jobs that were rejected. They looked great in the shop, but out in the light was another issue.

Check out this pic, this job was run in production, uni-directional.

hp/colorspan?