Best laminate for Gerber prints?

[SellersSign&Design]

I recently switched most of my vinyl from Oracal to Gerber/3M. I was using Oracal 290GF to laminate everything because it is optically clear and worked well, but now that I have switched manufactures I am not sure which route to go. I ordered some of Graphic Marking Systems' SPF 2 mil 7 year optically clear to try out, but I had some issues with it yesterday. I printed a run of decals on Avery small engine turn gold and then laminated and contour cut. Now today almost all of the decals have cloudy spots that will not go away. I am in the process of doing some further testing to try to figure out what happened, but I wanted to get some opinions from others on here who use the Gerber vinyls. I will mostly be laminating Gerber clear enamel receptive and 280 reflective. Longevity and clarity are both important.

 

[Billct2]

Since I usually have Gerber Clear Enamel Recp in stock that's what I use for Edge prints when needed.
We use it over signgold a lot.
We set up a cut file that includes the overlap, print, cut, weed a border, apply the clear, re-register and cut the overlapped clear.

 

[jfiscus]

We use 3M 8518/8519/8520 exclusively here for Edge prints, primarily 8519.
We've only used that as far back as it was available; made literally millions and millions of edge printed decals and never had trouble. I would venture to guess we do around 50 yards/day of 280 and other Gerber materials.
We buy it in 48" logs and have a local company slit it into 14" chunks.

 

[SellersSign&Design]

I may have to try the clear enamel receptive as a laminate. The reason I haven't tried any of the normal wrap lams is because of the low 3-5 year ratings. This will be going over top of hand laid gold work that will have to hold up on fire trucks for a minimum of 10 years. I have been told it's a bad thing to mix and match vinyl and lam manufacturers, but will it really hurt anything? I love the Oracal 290GF lam, I just didn't know if there would be any negative effects of using on 3M vinyl.

 

[jfiscus]

Mixing manufacturers will get you the run-around by them if anything ever does go wrong, and make it impossible to get real answers or help in that case.
However, I have mixed and matched a lot of different materials in the solvent printing world with never any ill effects, so it "should" be just fine.

We do a lot of fire trucks here and ALWAYS use the 3M series listed above as laminate (the 5 years listed in the material lifespan specs is for exterior surfaces).
A fire truck is kept indoors and kept clean; we have yet to see any problems with even REALLY old products that were produced and laminated correctly.
I would try to stay with a 3M lam if at all possible when using Gerber (3m converted) films.
This is also the same laminate the Leo's Gold used (even though their actual "gold" product is made from junk vinyl).