1204 fabric banner tracking

[letterman7]

Hi all,
I've been attempting to run a fairly large fabric banner - it's the Optisolve fabric stuff, so it's thin and very lightweight. I'll get about four feet into the print (which is not graphic heavy) and the fabric will slowly start "pinching" in the rollers, leading to ridges and of course, headstrikes. I can gently lift the pinch roller lever up enough to flatten the fabric back down without having the machine reset, and I have the pre-heater and platen heater off. The fabric appears to be tracking normally into the machine; I've been pulling and letting the fabric hang off the roll so the machine can pull it in as needed without extra tension pulling off the roll. Might this be where the problem lies? Should I have that extra tension? It seemed to do it more when there was, but maybe I'm missing something.

Any input welcomed!
Thanks,
Rick

 

[bob]

Hi all,
I've been attempting to run a fairly large fabric banner - it's the Optisolve fabric stuff, so it's thin and very lightweight. I'll get about four feet into the print (which is not graphic heavy) and the fabric will slowly start "pinching" in the rollers, leading to ridges and of course, headstrikes. I can gently lift the pinch roller lever up enough to flatten the fabric back down without having the machine reset, and I have the pre-heater and platen heater off. The fabric appears to be tracking normally into the machine; I've been pulling and letting the fabric hang off the roll so the machine can pull it in as needed without extra tension pulling off the roll. Might this be where the problem lies? Should I have that extra tension? It seemed to do it more when there was, but maybe I'm missing something.

Any input welcomed!
Thanks,
Rick

First, let the print pull the media off the roll. While there may be special cases where this is not optimum, for the most part this allows the proper and necessary in-feed tension.

Feeding unbacked fabric can be especially troublesome. On the rare occasions where I've had to deal with it I taped a core tube to the leading edge of the fabric. This tended to keep the fabric spread so it didn't want to bunch up on the platen and it added the weight necessary to proper feeding.

I have a stand-alone manual take up reel that I position in front of and parallel to the printer platen. The take up roll is has high as the platen. When when the leading edge of the media is almost to the floor I pick it up, tape it to the roll on my manual take-up reel and drop a core tube into the loop between the take-up reel and the printer to continue to provide weight and keep the fabric spread.

 

[letterman7]

Never thought about the outflow side. Good idea with the core, Bob, I'll have to see if I can rig up something similar when this job gets through.