Remove UV print?

[juan45215]

I had a contract printer print a design on to a white acrylc substrate with a flatbed printer. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the wrong design.

Is feasible to remove the image and reuse the substrate or do I have to throw it away?

 

[RaymondLoewy]

In the past I have removed FB500 inks from clear acrylic using VHB tape, they were small 6x6" squares so it was easy.

 

[Gino]

A razor blade will do the trick.... and it ain't hard to do. Just get the right angle and you can sail right through it.

 

[StarSign]

There still could be some ghosting if you can get the print off.

 

[bob]

The short answer is NO. Not if you're supposed to be a professional at this. Someone, most likely you, is going to have to eat the price of new substrate. If you want to do it right.

 

[Zach Starr]

You can try using the cleaning flush, apply that first and carefully remove it. You can remove it with that, and keep as piece for future testing, and get new printed for the customer. That way you would have something atleast to do test on.

 

[thesignpost]

A professional would replace the substrate.

 

[Gino]

Yowsa........ I consider myself a professional for the most part and I just did this a few weeks ago. Printed a panel and something stopped it and it double printed a section about 2 inches long. While we were doing the others, I took the panel to the back room and proceeded to just scrape the ink off. It came off swimmingly. No scratch makes, no hazing, no nothing. The piece was about 42" x 72". Took maybe 15 minutes. Then, for Murphy's Law sake, I flipped the piece over and printed the other side. Guess what, you couldn't tell a thing and this was not the first time we ever did this. Sometimes ya get a head strike and too much ink goes down..... samating.

Now, if I hadda do a series of them.... or a 5' x 12', no way, but my own in-house mistake..... why not ?? I think it's more professional to know how to fix a mistake than just discarding it, in some cases.

 

[Bly]

We use graffiti remover to soften the inks enough to peel off, then print on the other side.

 

[peterprintingparty]

I've had to remove UV ink from a 1/2 inch acrylic art piece. We did not want to eat that cost. So we drowned the print in denatured alcohol and it wrinkled right off. Super cool looking, and saved the large piece of acrylic to re-do

 

[juan45215]

Thanks everybody. The razor worked great. Saved me a hundred bucks.

 

[rossmosh]

Obviously you print on the other side, but as we all know, acrylic shows minor imperfections pretty easily if you're looking for them. A trick is instead of trying to keep the glossy finish, grab an orbital sander, and sand it down to a matte P95 finish. It probably won't look like a factory P95 finish, but you can get close using worn down 180 grit paper. Personally, I prefer the look of matte acrylic anyway. Gloss shows too many imperfections. Matte hides most of them, especially on opaque acrylic.