When you buy a brand new machine, you will never think about the machinery maintenance if it comes to a head. But you will find that the life of your sublimation printer definitely falls short of your expectations. What shorts the service life of your machine? It’s inappropriate usage and maintenance. This article will tell you how to maintain the service life of your sublimation printer.
Ways to maintain your sublimation printer
To begin with, you should make sure your printer has a stable working platform. When working, the printer should keep its front lid closed. It can prevent the dust and powder go into the interior printer and keep some hard objects to block the moving of the printer tray. In addition, do not plug the cable when the printer is powered on, which will damage the port of the printer and the parallel port of the PC. More importantly, it may even cause serious damage to the PC motherboard. If the printed pattern is not clear, you can use the printer automatic cleaning function to clean the print head. In this condition, a small amount of ink will be consumed. However, if you are not satisfied with the printing after several times of continuous cleaning, you may have run out of ink and need to refill the ink cartridge.
Make sure the environment is clean and tidy. You should keep the production area of your printing area clean as much as possible. If there is dust or dirt on the transfer paper - especially during printing - the image quality will be not good. Although most printers have a mechanism to capture paper after printing, if you see paper fall on the floor regularly, set up a certain type of capture container. Once the printed surface of the paper touches the floor, it will certainly not be used again. For one thing, too much dust will cause poor lubrication of the shaft. For another thing, it will hinder the movement of the printhead, which will lead to the inaccuracy of print position.
At the same time, it will lead to the unnecessary waste of ink. If the sublimation printer isn’t closed, the shaft will not return to its original position. How to solve this problem? You should lubricate the shaft frequently.
Be careful your Ink cartridge
If you use a sublimation system with refillable cartridges, be careful when refilling. Any dust or dirt entering the cartridge will affect the print quality and damage the ink supply system. Bubbles in the ink are also serious problems that can occur when filling the cartridge manually. Try to fully understand the process and ensure that there are no particles from the outside in the system.
Another aspect of machine maintenance is waste ink. Every time the printer cleans its print head, and some inks are used and the left ink needs to go somewhere. If you install a removable waste tank in the system, you can change it when it’s necessary. When the tank is full, it will stop work. Please remember to retain a spare waste collection.
Some printers use a built-in cartridge with a valve to drain the ink into an external container. Either way, make sure you regularly update your store's waste ink levels and take the necessary steps to manage them. Sublimation ink works best when it is stored and used in a specific temperature and humidity specification. For example, the recommended temperature range for some inks is 59 ˚ F-77 ˚ F。 The relative humidity should be kept above 35% (non condensing).
However, excessive humidity can produce moisture in other key components of the sublimation process, such as transfer paper and substrate. Moisture will turn into steam when it comes into contact with the heat press, which will lead to quality problems in printing images. Therefore, you must carefully control the climate in your work area to maintain the appropriate temperature and humidity. When the ink cartridge is not used up, it is better not to take it out to avoid waste of ink or printer ink metering error.
To avoid direct sunlight, the ink cartridge should be stored at room temperature. In addition, in an environment of low temperature and humidity, the print head circuit and ink are cause prone to problems.
Why the printing speed is slow?
Sublimation textile printer has many printing modes. If you choose high pass dpi printing mode, you will definitely get slow printing speed. High pass printing means high precision, but precision and speed are complementary and difficult to unify. If the picture is too large, the printing speed of the thermal sublimation printer will be slow. Before the thermal sublimation printer works, you should check the properties of the picture and ensure that the picture is not too large, otherwise, the printing speed is very slow, and it will stop printing when it printing.
If the computer system memory is taken a lot, it will affect the printing speed of the sublimation printer. The solution is to suspend all occupied programs and let the computer system focus on controlling the printing software. In addition, if the computer version is too low and the configuration is simple, it will also affect the printing speed of the thermal sublimation printing machine, because the printing data is transmitted to the printing equipment through the computer. If your computer configuration is simple, the data transmission speed will be very slow. Then it will inevitably slow down the printing speed.
