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screen printing => Equipment => Topic started by: ZooCity on November 19, 2015, 03:37:59 PM
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I am good to above average in my troubleshooting skills with presses but we had an issue on a print run yesterday that has blown my mind. Here it goes:
Sportsman EX 2013, appx 165k impressions, installed and registered by M&R tech last Dec, air locks, sq air pressure.
6 color plastisol job: UB - Red Chili flash @ 100power and 2-3s - Top Color - Top Color - Top Color - Reno flash @ 2-3s - Hilite Pressure on all heads low as possible to clear. All 225/40 s mesh, all single strokes.
Smaller, high back "locker tag" location, ≈2" down from bottom of back colllar seam.
Sq drop/front prox set to hit at platen edge. Collars loaded off the platen. ≈2-3" of lead out at end of stroke. Standard M&R 16x22 platens with rubber top.
Warm, tacky platens
Level press with mfg maintenance schedule up to date.
Micros zeroed out after adjustment, no torsion on the frame as I regged this job and my m.o. is to unlock the rear frame holder.
≈2k pc run, operating at 63 doz/hr
The UB was jumping out of reg like nothing I have ever seen. We regged this job over 5 times over 8 hours and each time we began running, about 15 shirts in it would jump out over 1/16" of an inch. We burned a new UB with even more choke, though the first UB had adequate choke on it.
We checked everything, I mean every swinging thing you can think of on the machine. In the end, I unlocked the rear clamp on the UB, moved it so that the clamp was snug up against the back of the screen frame and locked it in. Then I snugged down the manual clamps as well. Regged one last time and we were finally able to run. However, each print was different, no pattern at all to where UB the printed. The choke allowed us to run the job but that UB was trying to peak out the entire time. We had no other issues and the top colors all stayed in registration or a least acted "normally" needing only minor adjustments if any across the print run.
I did contact M&R to help troubleshoot in case I'm missing something.
We are slammed right now as usual this time of year but the next step is burning a set of registration screens and testing to try and narrow down what is happening.
I have seen this style of press bounce out of reg on a head but have almost always been able to track down why. With identical screens and similar pressure and angle on all heads I'm hesitant to blame it on deflection and as I mentioned we're already printing as light as possible. The problem repeated on a different screen with the increased choke.
I fear that it is a registration issue but I can't see how that's possible a year out from install on a near new machine with such low impressions on it between then and now. Anyone have an idea or another angle of attack?
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Out of reg left-to-right or top-to-bottom or all of the above? Machine reg won't be top to bottom unless your
center bearing is going.
Can the heads themselves come loose?
What fabric?
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not sure how the Sportsman is built, but one time on our diamondback, one of the pallet arms came loose. the bolts holding it to the carousel came loose and one screen kept coming out of registration. it took me forever to figure it out. cranked them down tight and it was business as usual. but again, I'm not sure how the sportsman is built and it could be different.
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All over, it was just walking around. Great point about machine reg though.
M&R tech pointed out to check for wiggle with the head flipped up which I'm definitely going to look at, it's the one place I didn't think to check. So I guess maybe that part of the head could loosen.
Ringspun cotton.
We're running OT here since last week but I'll crawl in there and check all the bolts more thoroughly.
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how often do you grease the center bearings?
-J
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how often do you grease the center bearings?
-J
On the schedule in the manual. We have a very thorough maintenance calendar/task setup for all equipment and the production crew keeps up on it as far as I can tell but i'll double check to be sure.
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Rear micro's not locked down? I'm sure you would have noticed this but just throwing it out there.
Grey shirts?
Are you using the press today without troubles.
Murphy37
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Try this scenario, if the garment has a sewn in tag and/or your glue/tack is irregular at the edge of the platen you will see this irregular jumping around of registration caused by the floodbar and or squeegee pulling the garment during the print stroke pass. It will drive you friggin' bonkers.
Our printers mechanical mind goes right to press registration when I have seen this with irregular glue deposit.
It may also be that a printed or heat applied tag does not bed in the glue tack the same way as the fabric and 'moves' during printing.
My 2 cents....
~Kitson
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Lord I wish it was one of those things but we tackled all that. Light green/mint shirts.
Tack and having the collar or shoulder seams on the platen was immediately addressed and I agree we printers tend to overlook the basic adhesion of the shirt to the platen sometimes. When I have issues like this with no pattern to it I go first to the substrate. The shirts are easily the least consistent variable in the whole equation. We printed probably over a hundred testers with all sorts of different fabric, seams, tags, used testers of the identical shirt style as well and still there was no rhyme or reason to the misprinting.
The print stroke speeds on this job were very slow for us, 3 or 4 on the dial, due to the image being right up top of the shirt and needing to give the squeegee blade real estate to start in and "recover". This has me looking at deflection again, as the heads deflect up (platen arms are pretty strong on this machine, heads do flex up significantly) the extended time in the deflected position may be part of the equation. But we've ran many similar jobs with no problems so I'm no sure about this theory.
Lots of DC on the press today and nothing printing in head 1. Next job up is HSA with a UB in head one so we'll get to check it then. I honestly think it would mess with me more if the problem up and disappeared today...
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how much pressure are you running? -- we only see the head deflection over 50psi.
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how much pressure are you running? -- we only see the head deflection over 50psi.
I can't answer for chris but I will say I know he uses a lot of thin thread/barely enough pressure to clear the mesh.... I am 100% confident knowing the type of printer/owner he is that he's not overlooking something as simple as pressure, glue, etc...... Chris is the type of guy that is leveling pallets every week, maintaining his stuff per manf. specs, etc....... Just wanted to throw that out there LOL..... I'm trying to wrap my head around this issue as well and right now I'm blank, sorry! LOL
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I would check every bolt on head one to see if anything is lose and tighten . Also the next time you print with that head run a long round of test prints 50+ and take a long look at that head while the machine prints. My guess its was a setup error and something like the mircos were not tighten all the way or some bolts were loose some where. In the future to avoid deflection issues place the shirt collar lower on the platen and use a laser or tape for collar placement. I always hate when I start seeing reg issues of the press. Also check your screen clamps to make sure their set right and no loose bolts. And if a bolt did come loose..... was it put back together right. Good luck but I bet it was user fault something that will melt away and resurface another day...... Unless its a bolt coming undone and undone again after tightening. I bet it was the glue 1st screen is heavy and pulls up a little bit and 2nd one has less ink and is flashed and pushes down the shirt into the tack. Watch learn and repeat.
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Ha, thanks Danny, I feel bad for bringing this up and letting it get on anyone else's mind, it's like a brain infection that will drive you mad.
I haven't been in a lot of other shops but from those I've seen we definitely put more time and energy into PM and doing things the way the mfg intended, it's the only way to have that baseline to troubleshoot problems from in my opinion. Also, there are times when machines do fail and I like to know for sure that's what the actual problem is.
That said, we're not perfect by any stretch of the imagination and I wouldn't put it past our shop to be missing something obvious. It's the real reason I reached out on here, that chance that someone would point the most basic thing out that we were derping out on the whole time. I'm still hoping it winds up being something simple.
So I got excited to get a machine in the shop with adjustable and measurable psi for pressure on the print stroke last year. I really thought it would help in comparing notes with others and in our own setups but what I've found is that tossing out this or that psi gets irrelevant pretty quickly. If discussing different machines, don't bother comparing psi. Same machines, it's still tough, so many variables change the scenario, as we all are familiar with. I think there was a good thread where this came up earlier this year. That said, I'm always on the quest for printing with even less pressure, there are many benefits to doing so, machine wear and tear being a major one in my mind. We do see significant upward deflection of the print heads at psi well below 50 but again, I'm not sure how relevant that figure is.
And I should remind that I don't print very often in our shop anymore so I'm only out there when everyone up through my PM has hit a wall with a job, I see all of the worst and miss most of the best runs.
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With Absence Of A Registration Device I would Print An X-Y grid Sheet On a minimum of 3 colors to check registration.
Check the print pallet to pallet and see if it drifts.
If it is on registration on a number of prints and then it is not, it is your machine registration.
IMHO someone of your caliber, should also be registering your own press. You would pick it up Quickly! It is Easy.
winston
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With Absence Of A Registration Device I would Print An X-Y grid Sheet On a minimum of 3 colors to check registration.
Check the print pallet to pallet and see if it drifts.
If it is on registration on a number of prints and then it is not, it is your machine registration.
IMHO someone of your caliber, should also be registering your own press. You would pick it up Quickly! It is Easy.
winston
Great plan! Given our location, I should probably buy the device to do this for our presses. Aside from warranty installs, press registration is the one item I need a tech for and getting a tech out to my location is not cheap. I get the math behind the process and the procedure, at least I think I do! Thanks for the push. What tool do you recommend I, or anyone with the right skill set to do this, pickup for M&R style machines?
All this with the disclaimer that registering a press is not for everyone and always best left to a tech if you have one readily available of course.
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Red head flip clamp latched or nuts loose?
See if you can narrow it down to just head one. Then it's only a few possibilities.
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We looked at that quickly today while the dryer was cooling, the latch seems snug enough to me but I'm thinking it wouldn't hurt for it to be a little extra tight.
Jim at M&R had a very good suggestion to also check the tightness of the jam nuts/wrought washer areas of the flip up heads. I hadn't thought of that area as a potential cause. I'm going to tighten that up before we get to doing a print test for reg and see what happens.
My initial repair focus is on the front assy of the print head. That's where the strength of the head is and any little bit of wiggle there could easily cause a problem like this.
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Jim at M&R had a very good suggestion to also check the tightness of the jam nuts/wrought washer areas of the flip up heads. I hadn't thought of that area as a potential cause. I'm going to tighten that up before we get to doing a print test for reg and see what happens.
My initial repair focus is on the front assy of the print head. That's where the strength of the head is and any little bit of wiggle there could easily cause a problem like this.
This. Yup, have experienced it in the past
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I was thinking the latch clamp or bushings--other thing I would check is if you really cranked down the nuts on the screen clamps themselves the last time you leveled the press. (I'm guessing here that they're still on threaded rods going up to a cast part)
IME it can be snug enough to feel tight, but shift when printing. Check the bottom nuts too. ;)
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Today I realized I never followed up on this.
The problem we had was related to the platen arms being loose. There are medium sized black bolts that install from beneath the platen arms and affix them to the core. Many, most actually, of these bolts were finger loose.
Checking these bolts is now part of weekly PM on the machine, I recommend anyone with this style press do the same.
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Are you trading weekly leveling for weekly bolt checks?
Sounds like a win to me. :)
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I wish! Now we have to do both.
Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk
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Just my 2 cents but I believe any press with air should be checked for loose nut/bolts especially under heavy use once every two weeks or so, the press I have is air and when we are rocking and rolling it's banging.
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This is servo/ac. But does have air lift and that's good general advice.
Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk
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Hey Zoo,
I would guess the pallets are slightly moved in which would cause the squeegees to land just off the pallet and stretch the screen differently on each print causing registration issues. What we usually do when printing locker tags is screw down on the squeegee choppers to limit the free travel if the squeegee is dropping at the edge of the pallet then riding up onto it. This usually takes care of issues like this. Also more of a squeegee angle usually accomplishes the same thing. That is our standard procedure for sleeve/pocket pallets. A Lot of squeegee angle.
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Hey Zoo,
I would guess the pallets are slightly moved in which would cause the squeegees to land just off the pallet and stretch the screen differently on each print causing registration issues. What we usually do when printing locker tags is screw down on the squeegee choppers to limit the free travel if the squeegee is dropping at the edge of the pallet then riding up onto it. This usually takes care of issues like this. Also more of a squeegee angle usually accomplishes the same thing. That is our standard procedure for sleeve/pocket pallets. A Lot of squeegee angle.
Great advice!
We make all effort to not drop the blade off the platen and then ramp up on to it, that can cause all sorts of weirdness. We also have had all print choppers locked at full depth from day 1, we only use pressure to control blade depth. But this is a good place to look in many situations.
This particular issue was 100% from loose print arms due to bolts loosening. Once we tightened up those bolts it all went away. I don't understand how the design would allow a critical part like this to come loose like that or, knowing that the part will in fact loosen over time, not be included as a check point in the PM schedule. We had no idea those bolts were under there as they are in a recessed part of the arm and not visible. We lost a lot of time, money and sanity on this and the cause of this issue changed a large part of my outlook on how a press should be designed for daily use.
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Hey Zoo,
I would guess the pallets are slightly moved in which would cause the squeegees to land just off the pallet and stretch the screen differently on each print causing registration issues. What we usually do when printing locker tags is screw down on the squeegee choppers to limit the free travel if the squeegee is dropping at the edge of the pallet then riding up onto it. This usually takes care of issues like this. Also more of a squeegee angle usually accomplishes the same thing. That is our standard procedure for sleeve/pocket pallets. A Lot of squeegee angle.
One of our sportsman presses does that often as well. The other two never loosen up. And we tighten the heck out of them. I'ts our smallest press so wondering if the faster speed has any effect on that.
Great advice!
We make all effort to not drop the blade off the platen and then ramp up on to it, that can cause all sorts of weirdness. We also have had all print choppers locked at full depth from day 1, we only use pressure to control blade depth. But this is a good place to look in many situations.
This particular issue was 100% from loose print arms due to bolts loosening. Once we tightened up those bolts it all went away. I don't understand how the design would allow a critical part like this to come loose like that or, knowing that the part will in fact loosen over time, not be included as a check point in the PM schedule. We had no idea those bolts were under there as they are in a recessed part of the arm and not visible. We lost a lot of time, money and sanity on this and the cause of this issue changed a large part of my outlook on how a press should be designed for daily use.
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This really bothers me, I have yet to see these or any other bolts come loose on any presses. Checking for loose bolts should not need be a regular maintenance item or something to worry about. This would be the same as having to check the pan bolts on your car every week. No press should be shaking bad enough to shake things loose. If you are having to tighten them often you are risking damaging or stretching the threaded holes in the press which will be a royal PIA to repair. The threads being damaged could be the reason they are coming loose. Bolts can and do wear out also from repeated use or over tightening. If they are coming loose I would highly recommend replacing the bolts with new grade 5 or better yet 8, either the self locking flange head type, using a locking washer or adding a drop of blue Loctite to the threads. All the M&R presses I have come across have the self locking flange head bolts on the pallet arms that once tightened are locked in for good.
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Hey Zoo,
I would guess the pallets are slightly moved in which would cause the squeegees to land just off the pallet and stretch the screen differently on each print causing registration issues. What we usually do when printing locker tags is screw down on the squeegee choppers to limit the free travel if the squeegee is dropping at the edge of the pallet then riding up onto it. This usually takes care of issues like this. Also more of a squeegee angle usually accomplishes the same thing. That is our standard procedure for sleeve/pocket pallets. A Lot of squeegee angle.
Great advice!
We make all effort to not drop the blade off the platen and then ramp up on to it, that can cause all sorts of weirdness. We also have had all print choppers locked at full depth from day 1, we only use pressure to control blade depth. But this is a good place to look in many situations.
This particular issue was 100% from loose print arms due to bolts loosening. Once we tightened up those bolts it all went away. I don't understand how the design would allow a critical part like this to come loose like that or, knowing that the part will in fact loosen over time, not be included as a check point in the PM schedule. We had no idea those bolts were under there as they are in a recessed part of the arm and not visible. We lost a lot of time, money and sanity on this and the cause of this issue changed a large part of my outlook on how a press should be designed for daily use.
The front a-frame and micro plates are very robust and will last way longer than the press is designed for if maintained properly. I have a 27 year old press on display here at M&R with ten's of millions of imprints and the micro lock nuts are still as good as the day we put them on. Are you leaving the screen holders in the up position all the time when not in use? I suggest you don't if you are. Its the same as leaving the trunk of your car open and driving around. Bet the trunk lid would be pretty shot after a day or two! Put them in the down and locked position instead and that will help a lot.
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The only problem I have with our press is the the screw backing out on the manual screen clamps foot, I was at a Harley bike rally and was talking with one the bikers, he was going over his bike checking for loose bolts. He told me that was a big problem on his bike being it was a hard tail.
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Hey Rich,
The front A-frames were not the problem. On M&R's advice I did open up the face plates and tighten up all the nuts on them, which is a good idea anyways, but it wasn't the issue in our case.
The bolts I'm referring to are the ones that connect the spider arm to the carousel, in toward the center. I searched through the parts schematics in the manual multiple times but they don't appear to be called out anywhere in there.
When these bolts loosened it left the entire spider arm wobbly, thus causing the prints to be mysteriously out of register with no traceable pattern.
I can assure you that maintenance was no part of the issue here.
You have two users reporting this on certain Sportsman machines, it may be worthwhile to investigate why your bolts are spinning out. Could be the bolt quality as binkspot suggested, could be the tapping, could just be inherit to the design. I don't see any shaking on our machine but it does run everyday.
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Does the Sportsman have a nut and a bolt, or is it tapped into the main part of the machine?
My old challenger had bolts and nuts, and we used lock washers. Never had a problem.
The new CHIIID is tapped in, and we just torqued them to spec, and never had a problem.
Maybe try Loc-tite? And torque them again?
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Zoo, I think Brandon was talking about the jam nuts on the A-frame like Rich was.
If those bolts are 7/16th or 1/2" like ours, I'd bet there should be a hefty bit of torque on them.
80-100 ft-lbs?
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Call me to discuss. Those bolts should never come loose no matter how bad the press is running. Who installed the press?
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Call me to discuss. Those bolts should never come loose no matter how bad the press is running. Who installed the press?
M&R did. I'm not sure what there is to discuss, they came loose, we now keep an eye on them and tighten and haven't had any further problems, I don't want to waste any of your time since we resolved the issue.