Mimaki UCJV300 Printing on Matte Black Vinyl... Questions

[L&Bdesignworks]

Hi everyone -

So I recently purchased a UCJV 300-160, and it seems to be a nice machine, but I'm doing a few things that are out of the ordinary.

I've been printing vehicle decals, (not full rap type things, more specific area decals for Jeeps, etc.) Especially focusing on gloss on matte black type designs.

I have stumped several texts from the company I purchased it from, and have mostly been figuring out on my own, and it has been going okay, but I've been having some issues specifically on the matte black. Black. I know it's not typical to print on it, but some of the tests I've done have been holding up very well, but I've been having some inconsistencies that I'd like to nail down.

First off printing the special plate of white works fine, but sometimes when I run the color in the same pass without retracting, it can bleed and desaturate the color. Basically. Sometimes it works great, sometimes it doesn't.

If I retract between the white and the color, sometimes the alignment gets off a little bit and there's a white shadow which looks pretty bad.

The next issue I've been having, is dealing with the registration marks. Marks. It prints the registration marks by default in black, and the sensors don't see it. I've had a little bit of luck with filling around the mark, but it doesn't give me any option of what color to use for filling in.

Not sure if anyone has any tips or ideas on this, but any help would be greatly appreciated!

-B

 

[Zendavor Signs]

I’m not an operator, so I can’t address your issues specifically, but we have this machine in our shop. Why would the white ink be bleeding with the 4c? We run white/4c in the same pass all the time with no problems. Something is wrong there. Are the orange stripes supposed to be red like in the first photo? You do not want to retract the print, you are asking for major registration issues. I know we have run into the registration marks issue before. I don’t believe you can change the color of them. We have placed cut white vinyl marks on top. I think that works, or we did a decal - white background, black mark on top.

 

[JBurton]

What is the matte black vinyl you're using in the first place?
Why print the white shadow on the black elements? I can see why if you have to use it on all colors in a print, but if it's optional on individual colors, you'd think black on black = black, just glossy?
In fact, doesn't this machine offer both matte and glossy finishes? Couldn't you just produce the matte/glossy look on a typical print media? Unless they're going on windows or something where you want the reverse side to be uniform and black.
It's some different stuff for sure, the black on black is pretty dramatic.

 

[InkHead]

We used to have the UCJV. In rasterlink, there is an option to print red under the registration marks. If I remember correctly, it's called "Fill around register marks". It's in the Crop Marks section

Ink shouldn't be bleeding since it is a UV printer and it cures instantly. If your white is poking out from underneath, you need to choke the white base layer. I believe this is in the Layer Adjust tab. You will see a section for the White ink and you can thin the white base layer in the scan and feed position. Usually 2 or 3 pixels does the trick.

You should not have to do a roll back at all on this machine to print anything except if you are printing white and clear together. The rollback does cause print alignment issues. Avoid it if you can.

 

[Kemik]

You can not print white and clear in 1 pass.
Printing White + CMYK in 1 pass will not bleed together.
Printing CMYK + Clear in 1 pass will not bleed together.
Printing White + CMYK + Clear in 1 pass WILL BLEED together.

You can "thin" the edges of the white so it does not peek out from behind the CMYK.
Layers tab, choose the white layer, check correct the size, pick thinning, click the up arrows twice each, that's normally enough for vector print, but play around with it until it suits your needs.

The pull back and realignment is not an easy one to achieve, I would avoid this, especially for long prints. It works okay within about 1 foot of print, and works better in single pass mode.

Choosing fill around the registration marks add a red block, but you also need to adjust the sensor level at the machine, try lowering the sensor from4 to 2 and see how that works.

I believe there is an Illustrator plug-in that will allow you to add the crop marks to the artwork where you can then recolour them. I have not used this yet, but I heard this froma Mimaki employee. I believe it is a feature of FineCut?

JBurton is also correct, you can print matte black ink on white material, and add the gloss effect ontop of that to achieve white, black, cmyk and gloss in 1 pass.