2000 sq ft of printing, what are the best practices for long runs

do a printhead test, if all looks good, fire away.

heads in motion tend to stay in motion....

 

54" = 4.5' x 450' = 2025 sq. ft.
450' linear ft divided by 150' (1 roll) = 3 rolls.

Not so bad.

 

Have a spare printhead cleaning kit standing by.

 

If it's too big of a worry we'd be happy to print this job for you. Give Bryan a call at 801-305-1655 or send an email to sales@abacatalog.com and we'd be happy to quote this out for you.

Thank you.

 

For a huge job I usually run a Cleaning before hand. Depending on what's printing you may want to add the bar on the side to keep all the heads printing.

Ie- if most of your roll doesn't use magenta... Then 75 ft into.the roll red prints... It could start banding. Whereas if you use the bar, all colors will constantly print and it costs pennies to do.

It's also good because you can see if a color starts banding or not.

 

BE SURE TO FLIP EVERY OTHER PANEL in the rip.
Had a huge trailer wrap once and due to the dimensions it would crash the old rip. Had to send panels individually; and forgot to flip the odd panels. Had to reprint 1/2 the truck...

 

Do an image quality optimization before printing and print gutters/bars as previously mentioned.

 

Now our process is this:
Head Cleaning / Alignment - replace as needed
Color Calibration (on printer) - sets comparison baseline for future work.
Run gutter color bars - if printing alot of solid colors

Have spare heads, cleaning kit, and ink.

Those first 2 steps in that order will help ensure color repeatability for future and subsequent work.

Also with thermal print heads the more they run the more stable they are. When we bought our first 570 we ran 100,000 sqft in under 15 days, we had over 25L through each head and only had to change a black head during that run.

 

Throwing in my 2 cents yet again. I don't know if your machines or production software has an output compensation setting, but be sure that it is properly calibrated beforehand. We've had several print jobs over the years come out too long because this setting was missed.

 

Do you run that process before every new roll to make sure you can keep using the same printheads? 25L blows my mind. I keep seeing people say 4L.

 

We don't use that process on every roll, only color critical or repeatable jobs. If you are getting up there in ink through the head you definitely want to do this to verify you will get correct output.

Color calibration (linearization) is recommended at least weekly and the environmental changes can effect colors drastically.

 

Do those processes use much ink or is it more expensive in time?

 

Its mostly time, we calculate about 3sqft of material and 20mins of time.