Replacement Rollers for Laminator

[Mike Sellers]

Is it possible to get the silicone replaced on the rollers from a laminator and if so where?
Mike

[bill t.]

You SHOULD be able to buy replacement rollers from the supplier or the manufacturer.

Which reminds me that before buying any piece of equipment like a roller laminator, one should first call up anonymously to ask for replacement parts for the machine of interest.

The lack of replacements parts is the problem with cheap ebay laminators, which must be viewed as expendables.

[Mike Sellers]

Bill,
Have you purchased a laminator yet? Are you trying to get away from spraying or what?

[bill t.]

I'm still looking at professional laminators, while getting by with an ebay-special that is usable up to a point provided that one stays within certain limitations and has an assistant always at the ready.  I'm getting better at it, the time spent in Hell with that klunker has taught me a lot about what laminators need to be.

I don't plan to use over-laminates in lieu of spraying, but I do plan to go over to spraying solvent coatings which I feel has significant presentation advantages, and possibly also workflow advantages given the right shop setup.  Spray, dry, and mount a 44 x 98 inch sheet o' prints in less than 1 hour.  Will tell you all about it when I have a good workflow figured out.

The laminator is for panel mounting to serve a newly emerging customer base of young, urban, hip, upward-mobiles with miles upon linear miles of freshly painted white condo walls in need of Cotemporary Looking Art.  There are about 1,500 of those units opening within a couple miles of my best gallery this year alone, and more on the way.

[Mike Sellers]

I didn`t realize that the solvent coating dried so fast. One lab owner here in Ohio-Doyle Yoder- says this  "Drytac also makes some excellent Heat Set laminate that works great on canvas.
 I will also add that you can print roll to roll and then laminate roll to roll. Print one day (I like to let the canvas dry for at least overnight) and laminate and stretch the next. No waiting around for canvas to dry. Also works great for gloss finished canvas where the coatings are not water resistant that will run and smear with liquid laminates."
Mike

[Mike Sellers]

Bill,
I talked to Doyle Yoder and he is printing with a HP Latex printer and he is not coating the prints. Here is what he said "Latex (actually polymer resin) is waterproof and mild cleaning agents would not cause any problems." Bill, have you considered printing with a latex printer? What is your perspective?
Mike

[bill t.]

I could theoretically print an entire 40 foot roll of prints, taking the output up on a roll.  Then thread up the laminator to simultaneously apply a top coating laminate to the print side, while also applying an adhesive to the back.  That would yield "decals" that could be cut up and applied to substrates.  The throughput would be mind boggling.  That's why a lot of online photo printers use that process.

But there are problems with that.  I'm not confident about the drying quality of ink wound up on a roll.  My working environment is far from dust free.  For media coming off the roll into the laminator there is no opportunity to do touch up on surface defects and white spots that didn't print because of flaked off emulsion, etc etc.  Dust flaking off the ends of media rolls is a well known effect that would a introduce lot of flakes into the wound up roll.  And inkjet printing is a slow process that leaves the face of the wet images exposed to the dusty breeze for extended periods of time between the printheads and the takeup roller.  One could wind up a lot of problems on those rolls.

I could unroll the media a few feet at a time to make corrections, I suppose, but that would invite new dust spots which would be inevitable in my situation.  I feel more comfortable with breaking the process down to 8 foot long sections, where I would make a 44 x 94 print stripped up with one or more images, and generate 1 to 3 of those a day to keep pace with my realistic ability to cut and finish substrate panels.  That way there's easy access to the face of the prints.  I would apply the large stripped up prints to panels faced with adhesive, peeling off the adhesive just ahead of the print and substrate entering the pinch rollers.  That involves much more manual intervention than the roll-to-roll method, but I feel it would give a better product, if only because of being a relatively dust-proof method.  Another problem with simultaneous front and back laminating is that the least objectionable over laminates require too much heat for adhesive backings, so one would have to use lower quality, low temperature over laminates.

Those are my assumptions based on testing up to 24 x 60  prints, which is the largest size I dare handle with my existing laminator-like device.  I hope that extrapolates well into 44 x 94 on a motorized machine.

As for over laminates, I have yet to see a sample that gave me warm fuzzy feelings about the process.  I always think about the Peter-Lik-wannabee who set up $hop on Canyon Road with great images made to look dreadful by overlaminating.  Didn't last long.  Sometimes trying to hit a price point can hurt you.  Spraying is a pita, but the looks I've been getting with the solvent sprays is really superb, IMHO, with a resilient and almost sensuous surface compared to face mounting on plex.  PS, scratches and scuffs on solvent sprayed surfaces can be fixed in 32 seconds with a couple swipes of Premier Art Shield, compare that to facemounted prints.

[Mike Sellers]

Bill,
Are you printing on canvas and coating with the solvent spray? What canvas are you using? So many choices!
Mike

[bill t.]

Still using Glamour II for canvas that requires stretching, or Polycrylic for canvas that will be mounted.  G II is super well behaved and a good choice for production situations.  Poly is super glossy, but needs some TLC to get right.

Coating on Silver Rag with solvent spray, also testing a few others media.  Just loaded Baryta FB for profiling, and a roll of Simply Elegant Gold Fiber is on the way, said to exactly duplicate the RIP Ilford product.  Have rarely seen prints so awesome looking as the solvent coated Silver Rag, they're almost overwhelming in the good lighting.  Peter Lik is very afraid.

Solvent coatings also work well on fine art papers, but produce a surface that is so rigid that it is hard to handle and difficult to roll.  Recently had a failure attempting to glue-mount a 33 x 90 coated Silver Rag print, my first mounting failure in a couple years.  The solvent coated paper was made too rigid and slightly too ripply to conform to the Gator that was bowed from glue application.  That stiffness might also be an issue with canvas cracking.  A laminator is probably necessary to mount large solvent coated papers prints, a vacuum press might also work for glue only.

I have not looked closely at latex technology.  The machines are expensive and use a limited number of colors.  I think those are best suited for signage and point of sales applications.  I could be wrong, but I don't think it's the best choice for print quality.  To be fair, the cheapness of the media and inks sort of makes up for the cost of the printer.  The local art museum just installed 4 of my landscape panos printed on latex at 8 foot x 30 foot, with horrible cropping.  I can't say I'm thrilled with the quality, but OTOH they work well in the history exhibit they are part of and have already led to a few sales.  Money or aesthetic principles: pick one.

[Mike Sellers]

Bill,
Have you checked out the Drytac Elitecoater?  It can do 2 feet per minute. It is only 44 inches wide however. Might be an alternative to spraying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahWtqmA_NiQ

[bill t.]

That looks like more work than spraying!  Would not want to use that system indoors with solvent coatings.  I don't think that machine would offer much advantage over spraying in terms of time required and the amount of hassle.  But it would make it possible to apply high quality coatings indoors, although a skilled roller jockey can do that too.  Compare the times required to setup and cleanup with coating, to what that machine requires.

OK, maybe it would be a winner if you ran a lot of prints in one session, which is where classic rolling and spraying has trouble.  Could also be a good option in the icy grip of winter, eh.

There are a lot of coating application machines out there.  Daige has a model that's one step below the one in the video, which is itself quite a few steps below production machines.  There's a video somewhere for the Daige machine. 

I saw a machine at WCAF that could coat roll-to-roll in fully automatic mode, for $11k.  Had a dryer and everything.  Very, very nice looking coating, could produce mega-gloss in one pass.  But no thanks.  The catch with that entire zoo of machines is that you need to spend a lot of time cleaning them, their Achilles heel is the tendency of coatings to develop skins which gum things up.  The ones that run the media through a reservoir of coating have a very bad reputation for putting crud on the prints, that's why the best machines apply the coatings right at the application rollers, as in the video.  So never buy a used, reservoir-style application machine.