What do you fill vacant space with on your prints?

[CES020]

What do you all do with "vacant" space on prints? For example, if you have 54" wide material and your job is 40" wide, do you just let it go, laminate it and throw it all in the trash? Or do you have a folder of things you can drag and drop into place just to use as fill work for personal or professional projects?

Care to share any ideas on filling that space? Seems a waste to throw it all away.

Bumper stickers? Things for charities? Family stuff? Showroom stuff?

 

[GAC05]

If it is a foot or more & cast we cut it off before laminating, keep it clean and run scraps through the printer all the time. We do a bunch of little one-offs for the gas station forecourt areas here and the scraps are a good fit. There never seems to be enough time (client can't wait) to hold on a bunch of small orders long enough to nest them together and run a fresh set off the full roll.

wayne k
guam usa

 

[danno]

Everything hinges on the job at our shop. We might run promotional stuff for the shop, or talk with the customer and see if there is something that they could use in the extra space.

 

[Z SIGNS]

We pitch it in the garbage for obvious reasons.

 

[DravidDavid]

If it's not going in the bin, it becomes cleaning pads for our adhesive roller that we use to clean sheets of corflute for the flatbed or clean a solvent print for lamination.

We calculated keeping scraps, printing small jobs on them with the time it took to prep and set up a piece of scrap material on a traditional printer/cutter and corflute on a flatbed printer. 9 times out of 10 the effort and time cost out-weighs any additional profit we would make out of re-using strips of scrap material.

If a piece of corflute is too small for the bed, you have to turn zones off, section off the area in that zone not covered by corflute and that can take 15 minutes alone. Compared to setting up a full sheet and printing some extras on it (which are almost always needed) in 8 to 10 minutes after being cut up and packaged with a courier on the way to pick it up...It's just not worth the hassle.

Small pieces of corflute are often used for packaging. Great for keeping solvent prints nice and straight and to keep them safe from the butchers...I mean couriers!

Scrap corflute is great for scratch build RC aircraft if you have a battery, motor, radio gear and servos to spare too. Why print on it if that's the case!

 

[Pat Whatley]

Just started doing it a couple of weeks ago. I'll set up a company's logo and phone number in sizes ranging from 1" tall to 3" tall and send them a dozen or so with a price list for getting more. So far I've mailed them to 15 companies.....I've gotten 8 orders. That's a hell of a return on investment for stuff that was going in the garbage.

 

[Desert_Signs]

Just started doing it a couple of weeks ago. I'll set up a company's logo and phone number in sizes ranging from 1" tall to 3" tall and send them a dozen or so with a price list for getting more. So far I've mailed them to 15 companies.....I've gotten 8 orders. That's a hell of a return on investment for stuff that was going in the garbage.

 

[rjssigns]

We print stock industrial labeling on the "tails".

 

[Chriswagner92]

I cut it before laminating (B/S) and put it in a scrap bin, someone usually comes in every two or three months and buys all the scrap bits.