MacGyver Modification on a Roland VP 540

MacGyver

Today we have a reader-submitted MacGyver inovation from Andy Boyea of Lil’ Dogs in Ludlow, Massachusetts. You can read the shop profile on Lil’ Dogs here.

The things we do in the screen printing industry to make equipment perform for processes not necessarily originally designed for is amazing.  I’ve seen “tricked-out” clamshell presses, vacuum systems rigged into textile auto’s, exposure unit’s where you’d think the shop was trying to make some sort of mechanical monster and many other odd variations to equipment that was being used for processes that it wasn’t originally designed to do.  Heck, we are screen printers and we must get “creative” if we are going to turn a profit in a very competitive marketplace where price seems to be the only used sales tool in a sales pitch.  Of course, sometimes I wonder if the time we spend on “tricking-out” these pieces of equipment is worth the lost warranties and the money we “saved” instead of just purchasing a piece of equipment to do that specific task.  An argument to be discussed for a later article maybe!

Anyhow, I got “creative” by applying a piece of equipment to do something it wasn’t originally designed to do.  I wanted to use my Roland VP 540 to make wide format film positives.  I print graphics at my shop in addition to textiles.  Textiles is what we print 95% of the time and we use a CTS device for all our 23X31 textile frames.  However, when it comes to printing on our M&R Saturn 2538 clamshell press our CTS device just can’t handle the 42X50 frames we use in the clamshell press!  So, in my infinite wisdom I thought printing film positives on my Roland would be an easy thing to do.  I was wrong….at least in the beginning.

The first step was finding a film positive material that would work on an eco-solvent printer.  Roland recommended their clear film but this was a terrible film for film positives.  The film couldn’t handle the ink load necessary to make a good dense black.  I searched and experimented with over 20 different materials from several manufacturers and none of them would work.  Either the ink wouldn’t adhere to the film properly and thus the print was inferior or the print was great but the black was “see through.”  The issue is that most film positive materials are made for aqueous printers and the Roland VP 540 is an eco-solvent printer.  Everybody I talked to thought I was “nuts” trying to make film positives on an eco-solvent printer.  Everybody kept telling me it couldn’t be done.  “You can only make film positives on an aqueous printer,” everybody claimed.  Why would I go buy a 54″ aqueous printer for another $25,000 when I had a perfectly good 54″ eco-solvent printer already.  Buying a new aqueous printer would require a TON of film positives produced in order to justify that expense…and I am a t-shirt printer for crying out loud!  Roland, told me that film positives CAN BE MADE with a solvent based printer but then they couldn’t tell me what film or what settings inside VersaWorks to use to make good, dense film positives with….they didn’t have the experience with this type of application before.  I was about to give up.  Then, by chance, while looking for a nice artistic canvas for another job I had, I found a company right in my back yard!  Intelli-Coat out of Hampden, MA.  I noticed they had a material ADVERTISED as a solvent ink film positive material called SCF-7 Clear Film Positive.  I called the company and got a sample of it and tried it out.  It worked GREAT!  Ah-ha!  Now, I had to fine tune VersaWorks so I could gain control over ink density, halftone frequency, dot type and angle.

I tried printing directly from Corel Draw with all the appropriate dot settings but found that you had no control over ink laydown when I did this and thus the print wasn’t very good.  The film was a little weak….probably still good for most shops but I’m a stickler for clean, dense black film positives.  So, I called Roland tech support and they told me that VersaWorks can be setup to allow control over the dot variables as well as the total ink limit when printing.  So, they walked me through setting up a custom profile that would allow me to not only use Intelli-Coat’s SCF-7 profile within my custom profile but also allow me the flexibility to adjust halftone frequency, dot type and angle all out of VersaWorks!  For more info on how to specifically do this please go to Roland’s website http://www.rolanddga.com/ and there’s an article I wrote in their tech sheets as well as a user forum article I wrote on the necessary steps.

The one down side to making film positives this way is I find that there are some extra steps necessary now when sending film positives to the Roland.  Each color plate must be manually separated in your graphics application, colored in 100% black, then exported out of your graphics application (usually as an EPS or high res TIFF) and then imported into VersaWorks.  Only from VersaWorks can you control density of ink, dot type, angle and frequency.  There is a RIP program on the market by CadLink that is compatible with Roland’s VP 540 and will allow you to print directly from any of your graphics applications so you can control the printer’s variables from there and make life a little quicker and easier.  I believe the program is $1500, which was an expense I didn’t want to pay for the occasional film positive I had to make.

I guess most people would say the moral of the story here is to never give up and believe in what your gut is telling you.  I’d say, given the total time it took to make this happen, I probably should have just spent the $25,000 on an aqueous printer!

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