Switching from water based ink to UV ink?

Alias

Member
Hi all. I've been trying to find an answer to my question about switching from water based ink to UV ink. I even sent at least 5 emails to different printing companies and printer manufacturers, but I haven't received a proper answer.
This is the thing :
I've got a water based, Epson dx7 printhead and I'm using water based ink. The printer is not what is considered to be a standard printer. It is a wall printer, but in general it is an inkjet printer; it prints any image directly onto the wall.
I'm not really happy with it, cause I can't be sure that the machine will preform good. What happened in the past is that, few times while printing, the ink saturation was at the maximum and the ink bled down the wall. The settings were the same as the image I printed before with good results. What I'm trying to say is that someone the printed image is good and sometimes is not - depends on the wall. I really don't know how the image will turn out until I print it.
I've been thinking about changing the water based ink system to UV ink system: replacing water based printhead to solvent based, ink line to uv line, dumpers, cartridges... everything and at the end, adding UV curing led light to the system as well.
My question is : will it work? Would I be able to print?
I know that viscosity is different, but the software has an option to reduce the amount of ink coming out of the printhead and to adjust darkness of the image. I think I could actually get the good results by playing with these settings, but all this would cost me a fair amount of money. Does anyone know if this can be done? Thank you so much for your comments. Help is much appreciated.
 
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I know nothing about wall printing but one thing you said I can relate to, that is that your results depend on the quality of the wall you are printing on, this is true to most printing method that if you print on poor stock you usually get poor results. Can you not prepare the wall better by applying a primer coat of something to give yourself a better surface to print on, might be cheaper that printing UV which still could give poor results on a poor surface.
 
Thanks for your reply. I was thinking the same thing, to apply primer to wall first. I've been looking into it for the past few days, but can't find water based primer. I presume that's what I need, cause the ink is water based? Can you recommend which primer would suit the best and where to buy it? Tnx
 

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