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Quote "the company reckons to run at 140% capacity on average." Surely it is not possible to operate 140% over capacity unless at the end of each week you are 40% further behind in turnaround than you were at the start of the week ??? I would have thought the goal for most printers is to be at...

We have a visit from Van-Son technical dept booked today to test their inks again. We never had much luck with the old formulation and found it to be very quick drying on the rollers so no down-time possible and also very picky on parts of the job with straight lines etc. Maybe they have changed...

What product have you replaced the IPA with?

Update... Presstek ran our inks in the showroom but could not run enough work to reach fault temperature on the press, it takes about three hours running to reach that point, at least they tried it. We ran all morning yesterday with the Toyo inks and could not reproduce our fault. This...

My forum name was a throwback from the very early days of owning the smaller 34di press, it really was not a happy machine in our environment and was a nightmare from day 1, since upgrading to the 52 it has been excellent mostly and is a completely different animal - built to take a hammering...

Yes we too would like to try Toyo even as a test but here are the difficulties with this... 1 - The press has to be warm so would mean running waste for 2-3 hours with the Toyo inks, that's a lot of waste. 2 - We can't run jobs with normal ink then switch to Toyo as the by the time we have...

Yes, the substrate is very rarely the right colour, I know of only one make of paper that is. If it's super-critical then a wet-proof is needed as proof matching will not be accurate if the paper is off-colour. However, we can recalibrate our proofing system to match a certain substrate...

I find it works very well, I know that as long as I am running my press with the density variation as close to zero as possible**, then my work will pass an ISO match which is good enough for me and good enough for the client - it matches the proof which was passed OK, I don't even need to...

I was merely stating how we were taught to profile our system, clearly there are other ways to achieve the same goal. ;)

Thanks Alois, education never hurts :) Dave

For press work, the LAB values are established on-press by running ink to the lowest delta-E reading possible. That should then define the LAB values for that paper / ink combination. Not all inks will achieve ISO values and this will become apparent when very high delta-E values are seen.

The picture.... Shows the start of a new job at about 11:00-12:00 in the day so the press is warm and the problem has shown its face. The grip edge is at the bottom and shows a feint cyan tone, this is normal and will clear in 4-5 sheets, the portion from grip to midway is the plate-saver...

I did not know that Presstek made them directly, I was presuming they were made by someone like Kodak etc. Yes, a full cycle would be - Plate advance, smoothing with blanket, imaging, dry clean, wet clean, inking, printing. I have negated the blanket wash by doing a hand wash first, and also...

Thanks londonbob but this is hardly an old clunker, its a 4 year old press with only 20m on the clock, not even run-in yet. I would never try waterless without press temperature control, just won't work. Our run lengths are between 500 and 20,000, mostly 2,000 - 8,000 sheets. Dave

Personally i would get them below the pipework - shadows are very distracting. The useful light from a fluorescent is very dependant upon distance. Our lighting is around the 3m height, closer together around the press but more spaced in the general workshop area, I have a lux meter but just...

Yes - that one point alone regarding the plate-saver area has thrown everything and everyone into a frenzy of "well I'm baffled, never seen that before" :) It really does contradict everything else and points a finger directly at the plates, but it seems only if using these inks (just to make...

Nothing has changed really, I am running the same blankets as I was before the problem arose, the rollers are checked meticulously (especially so recently), the machine had a full service in December, the chiller indicates 18c and the rollers measure 19c when running, the room is at a capped 21c...

More info, This problem can be fought by adding silicon oil to the inks. All waterless inks contain silicon oil, the ones I am using have 0.5% content. This oil rides on the surface of the ink film on the rollers and coats the non-image areas of the plate thereby helping them reject the ink...

Thanks Erik, exactly the sort of reply i was seeking. My personal gut feeling is that there has been an unannounced change made to the make-up of the plate surface and this change allied with temperatures at their limits and our chosen ink has made the system sensitive to toning on new plates...

Yes, we know that, but we have never had water on this press but only started having a problem in the last six months or so. This is why I am searching for areas to concentrate on.