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Mil Thickness of Material is Too High

SCDesign

New Member
We found a textured material that would be perfect for us, but it's 20 mil thick, and the max mil thickness that our HP Latex 310 can supposedly handle is 19.7. Has anyone here pushed the mil thickness limit on their machine before? .3 mil doesn't seem like a huge amount to go over by, but I really don't know what the risks are to the machine. I don't want our printer to be down because we got greedy with it! I'm hoping that the 19.7 limit is more of a guideline than a hard limit, but I'm wondering what you guys think.
 

BigfishDM

Merchant Member
We found a textured material that would be perfect for us, but it's 20 mil thick, and the max mil thickness that our HP Latex 310 can supposedly handle is 19.7. Has anyone here pushed the mil thickness limit on their machine before? .3 mil doesn't seem like a huge amount to go over by, but I really don't know what the risks are to the machine. I don't want our printer to be down because we got greedy with it! I'm hoping that the 19.7 limit is more of a guideline than a hard limit, but I'm wondering what you guys think.

All the time! Go for it, probably be fine. I have put some crazy do not attempt type materials and all of them worked fine.
 
Do so at your own risk. The heads are something like $130 each. A bad headstrike might cost you a few hundred bucks. In the grand scheme of wideformat printing this is cheap. I'd be a lot more nervous about this on a solvent printer using a piezo head.

Even though it's out of the specs, I've seen .030 magnet go through the printer just fine. Like all mediums on this printer the heat is the key. Make sure you're profile isn't overheating the media. This will causing the media to warp and then you'll see headstrikes. I would start low (possibly too low) and work my heat up until it's curing even with heavier saturation images.

These numbers are somewhat hypothetical, but.... To be safe, you may want to Clone a profile and set it "slow and low." Start with a 12 pass printmode, go into the Advanced Settings and set an Interpass Delay of 300ms. Then set the temperature to something like 190-200F. Saturation on most materials will be in the 100-110% range. Again, this really depends on the actual material, but these numbers would be a pretty good starting place for a lot of (heat sensitive) materials.
 
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