Printing multiple layers

[fxer]

Hi all,
I got a bit of 10-mil LexEdge II to play with and thought I'd make myself a cool business card, but results are not great. I printed red text, white text, and then solid black over that. Around the edges of the red and white text, some black is missing. It's especially noticeable in the middle of the text characters (like the center of "e", "d", "o", etc) which remain clear/unprinted.

I've verified from the spool file output that it's printing a solid black layer, so the problem lies with the print. I've also tried this with normal and darkest settings. Any idea what I'm doing wrong, or am I supposed to use some special foil for this? Thanks.

 

[Fred Weiss]

Are the overprint color(s) set to overprint or normal?

 

[fxer]

Not sure... will have to check when I can get back to the printer.

 

[J Hill Designs]

yep fully overprint the black

 

[fxer]

I was able to get to the printer this weekend. The white text was set to overprint (icon with highest temp setting), but the black was not. I now changed the black to overprint, but got the same results.

It seems that the software chain is setup to do the correct thing (print a solid black rectangle over the white text, but that the printer is not able to do it properly. It's almost as if the thickness of the white printed foil is preventing the black text from getting into the corners where the white sections meet the lexedge. And the foil does not want to just bridge those sections.

I'm not sure if I can get a photo of this clearly enough, but if my explanation is confusing I can draw a diagram to explain.

 

[fxer]

Pat, I assume you have the metallic silver adhesive on the clear/printed vinyl side. Then how do you adhere the lexedge ... with another layer of 3M adhesive or similar?

 

[fxer]

One more note is that I'm using Omega 2.6 with this printer (FX). I know I need the latest version to get the full FX resolution, but is there some other software feature I am missing in 2.6 that could be causing this? Thanks.