Problems with foil floods on thin paper
We’re having problems running floods of foil on thin paper. No matter what we try, we can’t get the paper to stop sticking to the foil. It gets ripped off the platen onto the ground. It’s a kluge. We’ve been told an air blast would help, but we don’t have one.
We can hold the paper down with arms, friskets, etc. and no matter what it gets stuck to the foil. We’ve built paper braces to hold the foil back as well with no luck.
I’m talking about large areas of foil, like a page of 3/8” bars on 80# text stock.
Any ideas to make this work? We’ve tried all the different foil formulas as well.
Appreciate the input.
Casmit,
Make sure to run an “easy” release foil. Contact your foil supplier and explain what you’re trying to do. Use of this type of release may leave some edging but it can be cleaned up with cheesecloth. Otherwise the use of an air blast is necessary.
You could try fishing line in between the lines attached to the gripper bars if the lines run horizontal. Fire wire fishing line works better than plastic because it won’t melt and get caught in between the die and the platen.
try lowering your heat temp. you can also try running the foil “backwards” this pulls the sheet differently giving a different release. instead of feeding fresh foil from the top down, reverse it so it comes from the bottom up.
this is weird at first but email me with some pics of your press (the bed and foil unit) and i can edit the pics to show you how to do this.
Thanks for all the feedback on this. Press pic attached.
I see how the foil could be run backwards on this press. The foil unit is no longer supported so I may be running it the wrong way in the first place.
I used GWF easy release on my last run.
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How large is the form as compared to the sheet you’re running?
If the form is considerably large, but the sheet is not the full size your press can run, you might consider running a much larger sheet- 2X the size- and only printing one half at once. This would give you more paper mass to hang onto the platen with your various other techniques currently in employ.
Run the job one way, reverse the sheets, run it the other way (“work and rotate”? “work and turn”? whichever.)
If this is a short run could you cut some foil to the required size, place it on the paper and print that way I only use small hot foilers so this may not work on your size of machine also have you tried a shorter dwell time and is the foil too close to the block area.
John
the way you have the foil run in these pics, is “standard” or forward…off the back first then underneath and come up is backwards.
I would think that if you ran the foil from the bottom up on a Kluge, that it would lift the sheet off the pins/guides all the time. At least if the foil is going down, it will push the sheet against the pins, unless there’s too much sticking, then it would pull the sheet out altogether, as the OP has noted.
Make sure that the gripper bars are pressing down hard against the platen so that they will hold the sheet. You might have to take them off and bend them a little in a vice to get the correct angle. You might also try attaching some thin rubber matte to the underside of the gripper bar to give it more grip on the paper sheet.