All heads down adjustment / jigging on a V2000

[Atownsend]

At one point in time this was a 4 color press, its been a 6/6 press for a while now but i've never been able to properly set the all heads down adjustment. It's always bugged me that we wen't able to use the best feature of this press, so I had Vastex send us out a "registration jig", which came with instructions. I've been following them to the letter without much success. i understand that the tolerance here is very very small, like maybe 1/1000 on each reg bar. Does anyone have any good tips for setting these up? I suppose i'll bring a few tools from the house tomorrow (feeler gauge / calipers / dial indicator). I really dont want to spend another 6+ hours messing around with this thing. This is probably the most annoying thing that i've had to do in quite a while.

this is what i've been doing so far:
with hub removed exposing center shaft and provided wood spacer blocks in place on hub and adjacent rotor arms:
1) I have marked my starting registration bar, which is centered on with all the hardware tight
2) with center shaft bearing centered & in the race I position the jig over my starting reg bar, and the #2 rotor arm. then I very carefully adjust and tighten the set screws, jamb nuts, and then finally the 3/8" bolt on the bar itself.
3) move to rotor arm #2, then adjust #3 & so on until the end.

well..... this is much more difficult in practice that in theory. Sounds easy... but when I get back to my original reg bar, it is always 1/8" plus out of register. I feel like its dead on every time I move on to the next reg bar, but it must not be if i am off that far by the end.

This can't really be the way they put these things together in the factory. Is there something i'm missing here or am I just not as patient and precise as I think I am or should be. I haven't been able to find anything on this, as I'm sure its not a common problem to have.

I have spoken with Vastex several times about this, and haven't had much luck. Going to call them again in the am, usually they're really good about support, but this issue has been difficult for me to resolve. Any tips are appreciated!

[Binkspot]

You have too many things moving. The wooden blocks holding the tapered bearing are going to allow some movement. Whats stopping the reg plate from moving left/right? Assuming you need to lift up on the reg plate to drop it onto the next reg block you have movement. You also do not have anything locking the pallet arm in place other then a skate wheel which could even have a flat or low spot. Trying to reg all six heads exactly the same you are talking thousandths of an inch.

Personally I would put the pallets on each arm. Mark a center line on each one. Take a screen with no emulsion mark a center line on it. Center the reg bar on head one and reg the screen to that pallet. Then adjust each pallet arm so the center line on the pallet matches the one on the screen. You could get fancy and rig a dial indicator to the screen holder and measure to the side of the pallet but thing there is to much movement to ever get the press to such tight tolerance.

If your running all heads down and the people to do it, its time to start looking at autos.

[Atownsend]

The wood block on the center shaft acts  as a spacer so the jig is at a reasonable height to move up and down to check for adjustment. There are two allen head set screws on either side of the registration bar that limit movement and provide adjustment. Then there is a center bolt on the bar itself that locks the bar in place.

I have an old static "calibration screen" with reg marks on it that I used to make sure all of the pallets are 100% straight when making leveling adjustments & such. I did also make a dial indicator loc gauge kinds deal for the leveling too... Very handy. I will likely give your method a shot tomorrow if I can't make this work... I just want to avoid taking / apart / putting stuff together as much as possible. Hopefully the vastex folks can cue me in to the secret.

And for the auto... Been piling away cash for that. Just not where I need to be yet. We just moved to a larger bldg in anticipation. Moving is stupid spendy....We're @ capacity now, but not true capacity since we're not printing all heads down. Looking back I really wish I got this fixed a long time ago, would have been really nice since we do a lot of 5-6 color sim process on this manually.... Would be nice for the loader to print as well

[Vastex]

Hello Aaron

Sorry to hear you are still having this issue.  Please call our office and we can go over a few options that can help you out. 


Mark Clewell
Sales
mclewell@vastex.com
1-800-482-7839

[Atownsend]

Hello Aaron

Sorry to hear you are still having this issue.  Please call our office and we can go over a few options that can help you out. 


Mark Clewell
Sales
mclewell@vastex.com
1-800-482-7839

Hey Mark!

Been meaning to update this post. Problem resolved! I was able to figure this out actually. Your guy Justin actually gave me some really good tips / advice. He was outstanding and walked me through almost every conceivable issue that would be causing the issue with the reg bars not lining up. However, I made critical mistake when I first put the jig on the press. After fiddling with it for a few more hours, I was able to at last figure out my error.... I hadn't removed all of the bearings from the center shaft, which was causing the jig to be out of plane. Definitely a dumb mistake on my part. But not ever doing this before, it is fairly easy one to make... if you don't look at all of the photos in the instructions. Some times you gotta pay the stupid tax, and on this go around I paid with it with time. After I figured out the problem, I was able to get it jigged, set up, and ready to print within an hour. We printed a 5 color shirt today all heads down with perfect reg, and saved A LOT of time, so that makes up for some of my stupid tax earlier in the week. Thanks for an awesome press!

[mk162]

cool, now buy an auto