Help with a PC60...Please?

[WR_Orion]

Been having troubles with cheaper ribbons breaking so I bit the bullet and bought a set of genuine Roland ribbons.

Got my Roland ribbons in today, printed a bit and they work SO much better than all the others. But...now I have a new problem. After printing a few times, one ribbon did break so I had to open the cover, remove the cartridge and fix the ribbon. Did that and it was fine, finished the job then printed another.

Now all of a sudden, it will not align itself to pick up the cartridges. I ran through the head alignment steps for cartridge pickup, twice. The test works no problems. When I go to run a job, the head moves to about 1.5 inches too far to the right of the cartridge to pick it up.

As I said, the steps for aligning the head to cartridge from the service manual does not fix this. Any ideas?

One strange thing, when I run the alignment steps out of the service manual, on the test where it is supposed to make 3 passes it just keeps going and going until you shut off the power. Anyone know if this is normal? The last time I ran it, it went through the 3 passes 6 times before I finally shut the main power off.

Any help is VERY much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

 

[woolly]

hi breaking ribbons was normally associated with a printing a vertical hairline which was cured by the latter firmware.
for the pick up to be over a inch out i would say the head was moved by hand ? after set up.
one of the tests is to exorcise the mech and will run until switched off.

woolly

 

[WR_Orion]

Thanks wooly.

When you say excorsize the mech do you mean run the cartridge alignment steps? If not, could you clarify please?

Thanks!

 

[woolly]

no actual info here but as i remember one of the tests picks up each cart and replaces in turn untill switched off requires 6 carts to be fitted any colours.
never move the head by hand if you do switch off at the main switch and on again to allow it to set up correctly.

woolly

 

[WR_Orion]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is the test I performed. I'll check it again soon and hope it magically fixes itself Stranger things have happened.

Thanks again

 

[WR_Orion]

Well, it looks like after the head carriage scans the cartridge bar codes, then wipes itself on the cleaning pad, it "bounces" against the left side of the unit which may be causing it to be too far right. It's actually not 1.5" like I wrote before, actually more like .75" to the right of the cartridge it's trying to pick up. I'm really stuck here, anyone else have any ideas?

Thanks

 

[woolly]

if the head is bumping against the side that will put all settings off.
i will have a look in the morning to see what sets the initial position.
unless somebody else comments
woolly

 

[WR_Orion]

Hey, thanks! I really appreciate it. Have a few little jobs that NEED to get done.

 

[woolly]

switch off at the MAIN switch, load vinyl in the normal way, leaving the door up, switch on the MAIN switch.
press the sub power switch, the head should go to the far left and not hit the end.
if it bumps against the end then the sensor is dirty or faulty.
sticking out of the head unit on the left is a flat vertical bar about half inch high that would break the beam of the sensor inside the left cover.

hope i have not misunderstood what you were saying

woolly

 

[WR_Orion]

You do understand what I'm talking about.

And that DOES seem to be fine. It doesn't hit the side when I do that. It's only when I'm ready to print a job, the head goes back and forth to scan the cartridges, then goes to the left to the cleaning pad, cleans itself then seems to smack into the left side. After this it goes to pick up the first cartridge and it then, and only then, misaligned. Too weird. Thanks again for the help. I'm not real confident now that I can fix this. Guess I'll read through the service manual again and see if I can find anything else.

Thanks alot for the time you've taken.

Wayne

 

[woolly]

ok move the left pinch roller in 1 inch see what happens

woolly

 

[WR_Orion]

Problem solved!

Hey wooly,

I tried to move the pinch roller but could only move it about 1/2" per the grit locations (using 24" vinyl). That didn't change anything.

But...I got the problem solved!

I replaced the print head when I bought this unit, so I still have the old one laying around. I started comparing both heads to see if I could see any differences. That's when I noticed the culprit, to both of my problems. I've also been breaking ribbons like crazy.

The foam roller that pushes the ribbon against the vinyl on the old print head is pretty firm and turns freely. The new one however is really spongy and barely turns at all. So it turns out that because it wasn't turning, when the head cleans itself on the pad instead of rolling freely against the pad, it was dragging the roller causing it to "jump". This also seems to be the problem with the ribbons breaking. The ribbon was being dragged across this spongy roller instead of rolling past it causing it to drag and break.

So in conclusion, if your PC60 breaks ribbons and/or won't pick up the cartridges even though it passes all the cartridge pick up tests, CHECK OR REPLACE THE HEAD ROLLER.

Thanks for taking the time to help me troubleshoot this wooly. If you hadn't taken the time to try to help I might have just given up and used this thing as an archery target

Thanks a ton!

 

[woolly]

well done enjoy

woolly