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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Not gonna happen, you need a vinyl printer my suggestion is buy a broken one and find the service manual and fix it. My printer is worth about $5000-$8000, I bought it for parts, $1000 and changed the parts out to make mine work 100% check out marketplace and dial that distance up, I rented a uhaul, mines huge.

    I really doubt there are smaller vinyl capable printers for $500, but if you find one lemme know and I’ll buy one, I hate doing singles on my giant machine, so I usually give the purchaser a 24/42/60 inch line of them, unless I’m running multiple jobs.

    Also hp latex requires a flexi subscription, and my printer doesn’t contour cut, so you need a cutter as well, mine was about $4000, it’s a uscutter titan 3 68 inch.

    If you want to do wraps I use vinyl master dsr, it’s excellent also has masking of images and other cool features.

    Plus you’ll need adobe or some other editing software.

    Honestly, the only reason I purchased the printer is because I sponsor two race cars where I was spending thousands of dollars on decals to a company here in town, I ended up purchasing a printer so that I could print decals for the guy that I sponsor and some of his friends. So far it’s worked out well, but finding people for custom decals is a chore most of the time.

    I’m just kind of saying if you’re having a problem with the $500 cost, you’re going to have way bigger problems with the cost of all the software subscriptions to run the printer. Maybe some of the other solvent printers and stuff don’t require flexi and that might be best. I’m not sure. I haven’t used eco solvent or solvent printers since I did my research. Latex printers are amazing. They don’t smell it all and they’re dry immediately.

    My prints can be powerwashed and usually do not require any protection at all from sun and rain, race decals I do overwrap for scratches, overwrap laminate vinyl is extremely expensive for good quality rolls and the race drivers are the only ones I do it for, and some don’t even want that for cost savings, a wreck can ruin a whole side of a car.

    Rolls of material are expensive and so are inks. But it’s fun and you meet all kinds of interesting people.

    Edit oops accidentally cut some text before submitting pasted in edit

    Edit 2 forgot to say my printer is an older HP latex 260, also known as the HP Designer 26500. I get aftermarket inks, and print heads , you can buy lots of them on eBay, bought about 12 cartridges of most of the colors I need all genuine but expired, works perfectly for me and I’m not worried about warranty as I service it myself.