Need Help Printing on Oracal 351 Chrome

I have printed on other mirror chrome vinyls with my latex printers and it does not work well. The high heat tarnishes (makes the mirror chrome all dull and fuzzy). I have heard there are brands developed for this purpose but have not tried them yet.
Following!!

 

Hopefully someone with experience will weigh in - interested in doing the same on my 560.

 

I am no expert on this but I was just talking about it with someone in the industry recently and they were telling me that most chrome materials can be only be digitally printed on UV machines. We have always screen printed chrome materials.

 

We have printed on chrome and other "polished" silvers. No issues at all.

You just need to adjust your settings to be correct and make sure your ink load and heat settings are correct for the media.

 

I print on clear then laminate to chrome media
Depending on what the use is I then may even add a laminate to the printed clear
This way also stops the actual chrome from scratching aswell
Hope that helps

 

This. And many times I do this same process for print on reflective. Most reflective vinyls don't seem to run well on the printer, for me.

 

I don't see how you can successfully do this. Almost all the chrome, mirror, brushed gold and silver vinyls are polyester and not PVC, so they don't take ink like normal vinyl.

 

Its very easy to profile/preset for this. We start by creating a new media and going through the whole process including optimizer levels, then we create our profile using an i1.

Polished Silver and chrome is not that hard to work with.

 

What lamination must be applied? Is there any delamination issues?

 

Have you let the print sit overnight then tested it? I've only tried with Avery chrome / brushed aluminum, both are polyester based and it didn't seem to like the latex. We print fine with our UV on it all the time... and it says it's only UV / screen compatible.

I printed on some chrome... did a scratch test and it was fine. I laminated it... then the next day everything was falling apart. so I printed on chrome again... it worked fine, I let it sit for 24 hours... and then I could rub the print off with my finger.

We ended up just printing on clear and applying it on the chrome - Now... I don't have much experience creating custom profiles for troubled medias - Maybe turning the optimizer down or up would have helped. We don't print on it enough to really care, but I loved the look of it and wouldn't mind printing on it more - so if you say it's doable and the ink wont wipe off after 24 hours, I'll play around and give it some tries!

 

Yes, I have some jobs from 2 years ago still up at the clients. The only issue we ever. Had was too heavy of an ink load not curing all the way.