Vinyl feeding into the Edge

[David Wright]

I have an old Gerber Edge and am having problems with the vinyl feeding into the sprockets. After about the third color printing on a 6' piece the vinyl jams and all sprocket holes are mangled.

What am I missing as far as loading this? I use the tensioner arm but I also notice some distortion / stress on one side of the vinyl. Even after the first pass I can see the sprocket holes are being pulled on or stretched a bit.

 

[gabagoo]

quite possibly your punched holes are out of whack ( i have seen that before) or the vinyl is old and has shrunk...or you need to clean your sprocket on the machine.

 

[Marlene]

are you using Gerber vinyl or another brand punched to work on Geber sprockets? some of those holes are a little off and might give you trouble. also do you pull out some of the vinyl so it can free flow into the Edge instead of leaving it tight on the roll to be fed in? if so, does that help?

 

[Fred Weiss]

Is the sprocket that can slide up and down free to do so?

 

[David Wright]

The sprocket that moves does so freely.
I am using Calon (Arlon) int. vinyl.

 

[Fred Weiss]

Will it feed in just by slewing it or only when printing?

What happens if you use any other roll of vinyl?

 

[David Wright]

It will feed slewing also.
As far as other vinyl I haven't done much with this machine yet to know. It just seems to degrade the sprocket holes on each pass.

 

[WhiskeyDreamer]

is there 'goo" build up around the sprockets??

in order to properly trouble shoot this, i'd suggest trying a roll of gerber vinyl and see if you still have the same problem....it coould simply be the punch pattern on the calon material....not necessarily the edge

 

[Fred Weiss]

It will feed slewing also.
As far as other vinyl I haven't done much with this machine yet to know. It just seems to degrade the sprocket holes on each pass.

If the holes are deforming it is likely because the holes are not in proper alignment ... either due to the age of the material of mispunching to begin with.

 

[Dana Goodale]

I have seen this occur when the WIDTH from 1 set of sprocket holes to the other set of sprocket holes is wider than the allowable width of the machine. This causes it to bunch up and rip out the holes when printing even though it slews OK. Compare the WIDTH of the vinyl sprocket holes to another roll that prints OK.

 

[smdgrfx]

I have this same problems every once in a while. It has happened on older vinyl and a brand new roll. It's happened with Calon, Avery, 3M, and Gerber. I think it was a problem with humidity/temperature reaction on vinyl. We had the vinyl stored in the warehouse and it must have affected it. Picked up a new roll of same brand vinyl (Avery A6) and everything was fine. Just recently, it happened with a roll of 3M IJ180c trying to do multiple 36" process prints. It was frustrating. I finally just did them one at a time. The vinyl was about 1 year old, so it very well could have been the vinyl. I tried a different roll of a different brand/type and it worked fine.