Outgassing in 6 hours?

[MrDav3C]

Thinking about biting the bullet & upgrading our printer.

Considering purchasing the Roland Truevis SG2 or SG3 & read in the brochure about outgassing in 6 hours.

Wondered if anyone with real experience of this can validate this and their thoughts on these machines?

TIA!

 

[Gino]

Can't wait to hear these responses.

 

[MarkSnelling]

I'll put a hot-take out there - I've sold hundreds of Rolands and thousands of laminators in my career...for the first 17 years of my career, most of what I sold was specifically laminating films and laminators....with all the talk of outgassing, I've never once seen a quality laminate fail on freshly printed but dry solvent inks. Use the right profiles and make sure the inks are dry before they are taken up and you should be fine. The majority of my customers laminate as soon as it comes off the printer.

 

[bob]

'Outgassing' is something that's frequently used to scare small children into going to sleep. When a solvent print passes the fingertip glide test, it's ready for any further processing. Such as lamination, application, or whatever.

Fingertip glide test: Close your eyes and lightly drag a fingertip across a print. When you can't tell a printed area from a non-printed area the ink is as dry as it's likely to get. That does not mean that chemical changes to the media by the ink. That takes days if not weeks and even the most militant outgassing activists are unable to out wait it.

 

[weyandsign]

How much gas can be trapped inside a paper thin piece of vinyl? Answer = none

 

[robosigns]

Thinking about biting the bullet & upgrading our printer.

Considering purchasing the Roland Truevis SG2 or SG3 & read in the brochure about outgassing in 6 hours.

Wondered if anyone with real experience of this can validate this and their thoughts on these machines?

TIA!

RE: Outgassing - what they all said.

Another very important question: Do you normally maintain and service your own machines? If so, Roland is working very hard to stop you from doing just that on new models. This post is definitely worth a read

 

[ghostwriter1]

I have a Truvis 2 Roland, I've never even thought about out gassing, I go straight from printer to laminator sometimes and never had an issue.The biggest problem I've faced is uneven colour on large, plain single coloured areas. I actually gave up on one olive green job. Having a fan heater near the printer did help so It's a humidity or temperature thing I think. Other than that It's a good machine.

 

[MrDav3C]

Wow, OK! Thanks for all your comments -1 for outgassing at all so far!

Personally the only outgassing we do is on printed vehicle wrap & the only difference we have noticed with outgassing / not outgassing is the reduced level of initial tack and repositionability when not outgassing. Not a deal breaker either way.

I presume you guys are also talking about printed wrap & not just flat application graphics?

 

[netsol]

lthough i am far from the most experienced in this area, i can speak to my experiience with my roland sc545-ex, as an example
we always wait 24 hours because my vinyl is way too "stretchy" for want of a proper term
if i laminate a 72" long panel, it will probably stretch by at least an inch ESPECIALLY areas that have high ink saturation

 

[MarkSnelling]

lthough i am far from the most experienced in this area, i can speak to my experiience with my roland sc545-ex, as an example
we always wait 24 hours because my vinyl is way too "stretchy" for want of a proper term
if i laminate a 72" long panel, it will probably stretch by at least an inch ESPECIALLY areas that have high ink saturation

That's interesting considering the vinyl is still on the release liner....maybe applying too much tension on your laminator?

 

[netsol]

actually , you are right, i mispoke, this is when i MOUNT on sintra or coro

 

[petepaz]

we always try to wait 24 hours if we can but on many occasions we have gone a couple hours to right off the printer to the laminator. can't say we ever had an issue.
i will say the new roland printers are slow so if you find speed of the printer to be a requirement you might want to look else where.
we have had many roland printers over the past 20 years and still have an LEJ and XR both great machines but we got rid of our truvis (traded it in on a new mimaki) due to problems we had.
we looked in to the new rolands first due to our history but all the newer models are way to slow for what we do. the new printers were actually slower than the original truvis we had

 

[DL Signs]

There really is no set number of hours for for solvent to evaporate, the 24 hour thing just covers pretty much all scenarios. It's all dependent on ink, coverage, temp settings on the printer, print speed, shop temp, humidity. Just like paints, conditions dictate cure times. Over the decades I just got in the habit of printing everything today that I'm gonna work on tomorrow whenever possible, and still do.

After working with Roland equipment for so many years, I was surprised how fast Mimaki inks seem to cure, it's like a night and day difference. I don't have as many reservations about laminating same day anymore when I have to, and haven't had any issues on anything yet.

 

[ikarasu]

Wow, OK! Thanks for all your comments -1 for outgassing at all so far!

Personally the only outgassing we do is on printed vehicle wrap & the only difference we have noticed with outgassing / not outgassing is the reduced level of initial tack and repositionability when not outgassing. Not a deal breaker either way.

I presume you guys are also talking about printed wrap & not just flat application graphics?

You'll get people.who believe it's a myth, and people who don't. Its just beating a dead horse at this point. Personal I follow the manufacturer's recomendation, they're the ones who make millions off the machines and i don't understand why they'd tell you to offgass if you don't need to, they have nothing to gain and so much to lose by not advertising instant lamination... But that's just my thinking .


I will say this, 6 hour offgass is no better than 16 hour offgass, so I never understood that hype. If you work an 8 hour shift you have what ..1-1.5 hour of print time that can get out before the end of the day? Maybe if you ran 2 shifts it'd make a difference... But in our shop, our 6 hour offgass may as well be 16 hour as we don't laminate until the next day anyways.

 

[Boudica]

It's our practice to let prints on our Eco solvent printers sit until the next day for laminating. Latex is probably different (wouldn't know from experience - never used one). Sure we have had occasions/emergencies that we have to laminate a print right away. We'll run a fan on it as it's spooling as an extra effort to make sure it's dry. I'm a newb, so I've not seen a job fail from laminating it too soon, and I'm also just an employee, who cannot argue with the boss on this matter, because he has seen first hand the perils of laminating too soon. So it is a thing, but it may also depend on what laminate you use. I believe the biggest proponent on this forum who says outgassing is a myth, also has stated he has never owned a laminator, and only uses liquid laminate. So... maybe that's a factor in whether or not you need to let ink fully cure/outgas whatever to the vinyl before sealing it up with either more vinyl, or liquid laminate.

 

[MrDav3C]

Really appreciate everyone's comments, I wasn't really wanting to get into a debate about whether I should outgas or not and was really after more of a response about the TrueVis SG2 if possible!