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Encapsulated posters

Signed Out

New Member
Working on a quote for 100 3'x2' encapsulated posters. We've made posters for this customer in the past, always been laminated one side or not laminated at all. We print on postermax with a roland xj540. Normally we laminate the poster with oracal 210. They want these posters encapsulated (laminated both sides?) with .5" of laminate left on all 4 sides. So basically we'd have to trim the posters twice. Once before we laminate both sides, and once after to give the .5" of laminate edge. Any better ways to do this job or should I look to sub it out?
 

CanuckSigns

Active Member
we've done these before, they are a bit of a pain, basically you trim the poster to final size, laminate, flip poster upside down and use a sled to laminate the back side.

for onzies twozies it's a pain, but if you can get a flow going it may be ok.
 

Signed Out

New Member
From what I've been researching yes they are normally heat laminated. However, without having done this before, I don't see why they would need to be heat laminated, other than saving on labor time?

That's how we planned on doing it. print, trim to size, laminate on a sled, flip over laminate backside on sled, and trim again. Did you have any issues like picking up dust inbetween the 2 layers of laminate?
 

SightLine

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You "could" do it with PSA cold lam but ideally you want a hot laminator for this. Hot laminators have 2 rolls of heat activated laminate loaded and laminate both sides at once providing full encapsulation. We have our big cold laminator - GBC Arctic Titan 165 then we also have a much smaller 40" GBC Catena 105 which is a true hot melt laminator which we use for encapsulation, etc. Not using at the moment since we have not set it back after after recently moving but we also generally just keep a 30" roll of app tape loaded on it and use it for taping since we do not use a lot of hot laminate.
 

Tony McD

New Member
Used to do a lot of them at my old job, but we had a hot laminator, and the laminate wasn't sticky till the heat of the rollers hit it.
We could feed posters through one at a time, and then flip over and run again. Because the laminate wasn't sticky off the roll, you didn't have to worry so much about the laminate sticking to itself or the rollers.
If you have a hot laminator, you might check into some of that type of laminate.
 
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