Quartz flashes

[Underbase37]

This may be a bit of a dumb question.......does anybody have any luck with using you're quartz flash on tri-blends?  We do a fair amount of these & for us it = bad news. Just wondering if anybody had any better luck than us & if so any tips.

Murphy37

[cleveprint]

ive always just raised the unit up a few inches higher than we normally have it set at, and turn the intensity down a little bit. inks seem to flash very quickly. helps having platens warmed up a bit too.

[alan802]

We can handle them easily but we also have a lot of control of our flash unit and can lower the intensity from 100% to 5% in increments of 5.  We lower the % to 70 for tri-blends and lower the flash time and usually double flash to keep them from getting too hot.  Instead of flashing for 4 seconds we'll flash for 2 seconds but cycle it twice.

[Underbase37]

We are using m&r red chilli & I'm not sure if the intensity of the bulbs can be turned down.

Its the worst when doing multiple colors & a dark color needs to go first in the print order & then a tacky color like yellow after,... flash then more colors down. The dark colors pulls in the heat so much it shrinks & the tacky color is still not flashed.
Pretty much anytime a dark color is early in the print order it sucks with our quartz.

Murphy37

[ericheartsu]

I think Zoo had a custom built quartz with an intensity setting

[ZooCity]

yes our red chili came with an intensity control. I saw this problem coming what's the number of blends we print

Sent from my XT907 using Tapatalk

[cleveprint]

We are using m&r red chilli & I'm not sure if the intensity of the bulbs can be turned down.

Its the worst when doing multiple colors & a dark color needs to go first in the print order & then a tacky color like yellow after,... flash then more colors down. The dark colors pulls in the heat so much it shrinks & the tacky color is still not flashed.
Pretty much anytime a dark color is early in the print order it sucks with our quartz.

Murphy37

the F1 button the the red chili is where you can turn up or down the intensity

[ebscreen]

FWIW our Calmat and MSI flashes give us very little trouble with tri-blends. They have intensity control but we
rarely have to mess with it, just reduce the time. They don't have the amp draw of most US flashes so I'd
assume that's why. Couple thousand tr401 to get out by tomorrow. At least they're re-orders!

[ZooCity]

Is anyone making a high air flow quartz?  Seeing a need for this with HSA.

[Admiral]

We just got in a new Red Chili D last week.  It has the intensity control but our old Red Chili does not.  It sounds like Underbase37 has an older one like our first Red Chili, no adjustment at all on it, just time (and height).

We never had luck with flashing triblends with that but our Cayenne D and Red Chili D (not used yet, bulbs not even installed) can manage it, we have only used the Cayenne D once (I had to remove screen holders to use it) for a triblend job and it wasn't perfect but for a 200 shirt order we managed to make it work.  I'm sure it can be dialed in more though.

IR flashes definitely work much better with them, as we do them on the manual with an Acoma flash a decent amount.

Cayenne D has a lot of airflow...ours actually only has 1 blower in it though.

[Underbase37]

the F1 button the the red chili is where you can turn up or down the intensity

Are you talking about OF1, FO, FL ...... dial. Not sure what you mean by the F1 button.

Murphy37

[ebscreen]

Is anyone making a high air flow quartz?  Seeing a need for this with HSA.

CCI Pure White is flashing faster than any plastisol we've used with the MSI flashes.
Air flow a hard thing to quantify. We flashed a pellon before I knew you couldn't, smoke
went billowing if that says anything.

[ZooCity]

Oh yeah the HSA flashes very fast, especially on the first color down/base.  In fact we skip the cool down after the first down most times.  It's a nice silver lining to an ink that can be a pain to work with in mid-length production.

The issue we have is with faster/longer production runs regarding the heat from the flashes being adjacent to the HSA screens, the heat greatly accelerates the evaporation of water from the ink which in turn accelerates the need to constantly re-hydrate. 

My thought was that a higher air flow flash would allow us to keep the heat down and the speed up on the press.  It's key to keep the platens at a certain level of heat but also not let the platens get over a certain temp or all the better properties of the HSA ink gets tossed out the window, something about the humectants melting I think and this makes the ink tacky and difficult to work with WOW or otherwise.  Right now we're using creative positioning of fans to help out but a flash that's just blasting the air right where we want it would be best.  These inks don't just need a certain temp to flash properly but a certain amount of water removed so this could be an ultra fast way to run them, not to mention saving some power.

On presses that don't table up/down you could even use a hood of sorts coming down off the bottom of the flash to prevent errant warm air from getting at the adjacent screens.  For our Gauntlet, I think my approach might be to hook up a couple runs to our main exhaust system and place hoods over the flashes to evacuate excess heat.

[ZooCity]

Another thing that I'm wondering if forced air could help mitigate is we get problems with our TexTac when running a large, solid image area of HSA.  It's like water gets trapped between the platen glue and the print or something.

[cleveprint]

the F1 button the the red chili is where you can turn up or down the intensity

Are you talking about OF1, FO, FL ...... dial. Not sure what you mean by the F1 button.

Murphy37

here is a pic of the controls on our red chili. the F1 button on ours is what changes the intensity.