Help! Banding issues with L25500

[Doc Zoom]

I'm trying to print up a olive drab wrap for a drift boat. It's just plain yuk drab green. It prints fine for the first 5 feet then it starts to band really bad. I cleaned the print heads and it worked fine for 5 feet then started banding again! I'm using IJ180. Onyx rip. Any ideas?

 

[Suz]

Is it a new roll of material?

 

[Doc Zoom]

Probably less than 4 months old.

 

[Suz]

Probably less than 4 months old.

Just wondering if it might be the material. I've had 2 rolls of material lately that were damaged (due to being stored in various temps - hot and cold).

Did you print successfully with it when you first got it, or used other rolls from same lot that printed okay?

 

[Doc Zoom]

So far all of it has been perfect.

 

[P Wagner]

I have seen this happen on the L2 series printers before. What can happen is that the printheads begin to overheat during longer print runs, causing nozzle dropouts, or other print artifacts.

The L265 and L285 have newer firmware that allows for a very short pause between print passes (Inter Swath Delay) that has been shown to help with this problem. I believe that HP is planning on putting this into the L255 firmware as well at some point, but the currently released firmware does not have that functionality. There may be pre-release (beta) firmware for the L255 that contains this. The idea is that the printheads get a short breather in between print passes, and thus do not overheat.

In the meanwhile, the best suggestion that I have is to print this job in uni-direction print mode. While this will definitely show down your throughput, it should serve to keep the printheads from overheating, and allow the job to print without banding. The other suggestion I would have is to print with a gutter enabled on the left side.

 

[Doc Zoom]

Thanks for the feedback, sounds plausible. I cleaned the print heads twice and that seemed to help but then at the end of the print, I got a message to replace one of the heads. We had a head strike on a banner a week ago and I ended up replacing one head and still getting errors, so I swapped over the two as well as cleaned the contacts per the manual. So maybe it was a bad head. Time will tell. Thanks everyone and I'll let you know if I find out something.
Doc

 

[Fastsigns2041]

I had the same issue with overheating heads. make sure you have the latest firmware, otherwise you'll be cooking them all the time.

If you check in the web server it will list the error codes for the heads. If I remember correctly 10 was the code for overheating(could be the last 2 digits of a larger number like 80010)

 

[JoeBoomer]

If possible, upload a picture for us. Also, is this happening with other medias? How many passes?