roland LEJ printing problem

[petepaz]

i am printing on 3mm sintra. same material i have been using for at least two years and haven't had this problem. i clean the boards with alcohol before printing. i have tried 2 different boards on both sides. tried different settings. bi direction and uni direction printing, max impact, high quality and still the same result.
i also removed all the pinch rollers and cleaned them. i still keep getting these lines (see pics)

anyone have any ideas ???

 

[billram570]

Hi Pete,

Ive owned an LEJ since January of last year. Are you printing white underneath or just 4/Color straight on the board? Ive had this issue before when i printed on silver board when i was printing white ink and ran the color and the white in separate passes. My issue was the white wasnt curing because the lamp light was reflecting off of the silver board and not really curing the white ink.

Also, are you returning the print to origin or are you just printing the board through the printer without returning to origin? If your lamps are dirty and degrading and the ink isnt curing and you are returning the print to origin, the pinch rollers will pu the uncured ink when the board passes back through the pinch rollers.

Let me know more details and I will try to help you if I can.

Bill R.
Phase 1 Prototypes

 

[petepaz]

just printing cmyk so i don't have to run the board through twice so it's got to be something on the board or something with the pinch rollers. i have a call in to my tech waiting to hear back. i ran a job on 3/16 foam cor right before this and didn't have any issues. also been using this material for a couple of years with out seeing this problem....stumped

 

[Jack Knight1979]

If you just ran the job on foam and it was fine, I'm inclined to think you have a bad board there. Do you have some old stock material laying around of the same type of sintra you can test on. The boards you're working on could be from the same lot or even the same sheet.

 

[petepaz]

[FONT=&quot] Ok[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]I tried some older material (different batch) to see if it's just bad material and still the same [/FONT]problem

[FONT=&quot]I tried running foam cor and coroplast in between and no problems.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]But I am noticing it is only showing in the gray area not the colored area.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Could this have something to do with the color I am printing[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Makes no sense ??? [/FONT]

 

[Jack Knight1979]

can you run a fill/test pattern from the service menu? It will tell you what heads are acting up. How old are your dampers? How are the cap tops?

Most likely you have a head going causing horizontal banding. The fill test will tell you what you need to know.

 

[Gino]

It doesn't appear to be a contamination problem, especially if it does it on certain substrates and not others. I'd sooner think the profile isn't tuned in good enough for sintra.

We don't use sintra for anything... for anybody. It has lead in it and we don't want any parts of that crap.

Anyway, sometimes certain substrates will produce odd configurations when used on a different substrate, due to the way the material fibers run or just the grain of it. Your bulbs could be getting old and not working correctly on some substrates while fine on others.

Try a completely different file with the same light colors and see if you can repeat the problem while all inks, bulbs and air are basically the same.

 

[MDKAOD]

I'm a bit behind on this, but I've seen it with our LEJ as well. For us, it seems to be material dependent. I want from an economy PVC to a different manufacturer and the problem went away. The lines aren't from printing, it's the crap pinch roller system that Roland decided to use that doesn't allow for adjustment of the downward pressure on the material. Cheap foamcore gives us the same problems.