Jim Hancock
Old School Technician
I have a customer who has this printer. He is printing wood signs that consist of 3 1x4 boards that are held together on the back with wood slats. These are placed in a jig for placement. Do to height variations in the boards due to the wood itself, we have to add some extra media thickness to compensate so we don't get head crashes. When we do this, we are getting white ink seepage which eventually accumulates enough to cause banding in the white background layer. We did a series of tests using mat board so we were printing on a flat plane, without the various dimensional height differences introduced with the jig and the wooden signs. What we have determined is with the media thickness set to the correct value, i.e., the mat board thickness and the 1.5 mm head gap, we had no seepage. When we added .5 mm to the thickness, we started getting seepage. When we added 1 mm, the seepage was worse. I'm being told the new head layout design creates some kind of vortex that causes this issue when the media thickness is increased beyond the actual value. Are any of the users of this printer experienced this issue and were you able to solve it? The printer has been checked as far as negative-positive pressure and the head voltage is correct.