L26500 Odor, Dust & Other Print Issues

[WrapWorks]

I have a new L26500 and I'm having a few issues. The first 6-8in of every print job that is not back to back has a magenta tone with banding. The machine has a strong odor when printing - my employees complain that it smells terrible. By the time I left the shop last night, I had a pretty bad headache. Two days ago I was running a medium sided job (200sqft) and a light fog started to form in the print room. It wasn't smoke, it was almost hazy. The windows in the room fogged up with something that appeared to be a light film. Humidity was about 40% so I don't believe it was steam. The next day I noticed that the exhaust fans had a light residue around them.

I called support and we ran some tests but nothing conclusive. I have a ticket with HP but have not called in to them yet.

Has anyone had these issues in the past? Do you think they related to each other?

 

[KevSign]

Sorry this problem. I think this defective parts. I know other company had the L28500 latex part burn and smoke on their machine too, local dealer send the tech replace the part and fix problem. We never had on our L25 and L28 (yet).

 

[Hzone15]

Sometimes the materials when heated give off an odor, but I have never heard of anything like your describing.

What material are you running?

 

[HulkSmash]

odd..

 

[WrapWorks]

Running ij180cv3, a China brand and HP semi permanent self adhesive. They all smell the same. Headache city.

 

[sowinski_t]

I bet you experience this mainly with jobs that have a high amount of ink being put down on the media and fairly low passes. The exhaust fans you refer to are the ones on the printer, not your room correct?
I have a sealed off print room which when I don't have my exhaust fan running will "fog up". This generally only happens after 3+ hours of printing at heavy saturation, and full width printing. I think what this is, is the water (or whatever the carrier liquid is) evaporating out of the cured ink, and building up in the closed space. I imagine it is not all water so maybe that is why the humidity is only registering at 40%? My boss has installed an exhaust fan system (nothing fancy, just enough to move air out of the room) and that has resolved the issue in our shop.
I don't get headaches from it but I don't sit in my print room either, I only RIP and load my printer and otherwise I'm out of there.
As for the magenta thing at the beginning of your prints that sounds like it could be a heater offset issue. Is the banding vertical? I would reduce the warm-up heater offset, I keep mine under 5 degrees Celsius. You may also benefit from doing an auto head alignment if you haven't done one in a while.
I hope some of this helps with your issues. Good luck!

 

[BIG EASY DOES IT]

We had the smoking issue which in the end of a bunch of trying this and trying this. Ended up being to much heat applied to the media. The media was almost starting to melt and because of that was releasing gasses from the plastic/ vinyl itself.

Granted this was only on one type of substrate. All the other types were fine.

The smell I believe comes from too much heat being applied to the inks.

 

[signswi]

Calibrate your medias (including heat and fan levels). The only smell we get out of our HP is media specific (translucent vinyl smells awful normally, worse when heated).

 

[Kentucky Wraps]

3M wrap vinyl has a wax coating on the backing liner. Have you looked at the backing for any kind of change in surface? Is there any kind of buildup on the heating surface?