While helping a customer of another reseller, I came upon something
I’ve never seen before: Death by Inkjet.
As you can see in this picture, ink is everywhere; on the
printer, on the walls and on the label catch basin. After selling and supporting hundreds of
customers move to print on-demand color labels, I’ve not see this type of
situation. It reminded me of a scene
from Dexter; needing a blood spatter expert.
I’m not a blood spatter expert, but here are my and the customer’s ideas
on what created this scene.
According to the customer, “a label jams in the printer
while using the rear feed. After the
label jammed, the printer would continue to spray ink. The jam in the printer
was caused by the label separating; the liner from the facestock.”
As soon as I saw this picture, I knew to ask one more
question; are you using an unwinder?
“Yes”, said the customer.
Continuing he said, “it seems we get this issue on the third label after
setting overnight. Once we get past this
3rd label, we don’t have any other problems during the day; except
for dealing with ink everywhere. To try
to improve this problem, we moved recently the unwinder away from the
printer. Initially, the unwinder was
about 3 inches from the printer, with a sharp turn up to the rear feed opening
in the printer. Now, we have the
unwinder sitting about 1 foot from the printer.”
When I saw this picture, I told the customer
that the “dancer bar” from the unwinder is applying a significant amount of
pressure on the labels going into the printer.
Plus the dancer bar is pulling the label around a sharp radius corner
similar to a label dispenser. By pulling
the label around this type of edge, the liner may be separating from the
facestock. As the liner is thinner, it
must travel farther around the tight radius corner; thus it lifts and separates
just like a label dispenser. To learn
more about how a label dispenser works, check out Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Label_dispenser
In addition, the labels going into the printer
are taunt; with zero slack. As the
TM-C3400 uses a vacuum to hold the labels to the printhead, this inkjet printer
does not have any type of compression rollers able to pull the media. With all the tension, the label media “slips”
causing the overprint seen on the label in the second picture above. The bottom line; you can’t have the winders creating
tension on the media going into these Epson label printers. You might find this post on unwinders from
some time ago of interest:
http://colorlabelsondemand.blogspot.com/2012/05/unwinding-large-volumes-of.html
After a couple of days, the customer contacted me again; he
said, “I believe I have determined the cause of the bump in our labels that
thus, what is causing the label jams. The bump seems to occur at the rear feed
where the label bends around the edge. This “bump” happens when the label is
left in this position overnight.” So the
cause of the problem was NOT the bend around the unwinder roller; rather the
bend at the rear feed on the back of the printer.
To properly use a winder (both unwinder and rewinder), you
need to have a “loose loop” between the printer and the winder. Here is how I have my unwinder set up:
As soon as the dancer bar lifts, the electric motor feeds
out more labels:
Or this recent post on the new winding solution
from Labelmate: http://colorlabelsondemand.blogspot.com/2014/09/ghs-drum-label-rolls.html
By setting the unwinder in this fashion, you prevent tension
on the labels as they feed into the printer. Now, this customer has adjusted
the tension on the unwinder. I
appreciate his willingness to not only problem solve, but to get me involved
and send me pictures.
If you have blood spatter, call Dexter. But if you get this or any other issue while
printing color labels on demand, contact us.
We’ll help you to insure you don’t experience, Death by Inkjet!
Guy Mikel
855-962-7670
#colorlabels
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