 Hey guys, it's Kevin. Today we're going to talk about pizza wheels. They're also called star wheels. We're going to call these two series because there's a lot of stuff if I put in one or never finish. Those are pizza wheels. When the paper comes out, those wheels press the paper down so paper can be flat. For regular papers, you can just put the paper, just spray some alcohol and move the paper back and forth and clean it. The problem is when you use a coated paper, we all know that for the dye ink, dyeing gets absorbed into the paper and the pigment can lay on top of the paper. So when you print a coated paper, it's different. There's some coatings. They light the dye flow on top of the paper so the dye will not get absorbed by the paper. So if the surface is wet, those little wheels are going to dip into a pool for the ink. I leave a pizza wheel mark. This problem is severe for people who print large-scale photos and also for the sublimation. The challenge of sublimation is the ink is thin so you want to put as much color there as possible. So in sublimation, there's something called pigment overloading, which is you try to make the ink base can take as much colorant as possible. So if you can make the paper take more ink, you have a better image, you have a more vibrant image. That's why not only the ink is overloaded, you also overloaded the ink volume. Okay, let me just show you how it works. Any hockey player here? Okay, here's a Karina Star Star in my someplace. I'll use Photoshop and then go to print. I'll use a sublimation printing as an example. Because sublimation folks, they overloaded the paper up to a gazillion level. So if you understand the sublimation printing or you also understand the photo printing, how you overload your inks in the photo printing. Let's talk about paper type. Paper type controls how much ink the printhead is going to use. The plain paper takes the least amount of ink. Let me set it quite too high and print one page as example. The sublimation folks won't satisfy with the plain paper, so they go to printer settings and they set it to mate. Quality is still high. Same thing. I'm printing another page. You'll know sublimation folks. Good is not enough. They wanted the best. So they go to play with the ink density. So they go to print settings, go to maintenance tab, and go to extended settings. And at this print density, you can print with slightly ink and more ink. And let's crank it up to 20% more. Let's see the result. First of all, all those papers are their plain papers. Okay, although I set with the main settings, those settings, the real paper is a plain uncoded paper. So this setting is a plain paper and ink density is zero. With the same ink density, you change the setting to mate. You can see how bright, how colorful the mate is. And this is the mate plus 20. This is the most dense, the most colorful picture you can ever produce. All three pictures, no pizza mark. Everything's perfect. I didn't show you as I also print a mate with a density of negative 50. You can see at the lowest ink density, the mate still beats the plain paper. Now you can appreciate how much ink the mate put on the page and how hard it is to have a mate plus 20. Okay, now we're going to print uncoded paper. This is coated sublimation paper. You can see at the plain paper, density 0%, no problem, no pizza wheel mark. And when we set the setting to mate, and the color is much better, but you get this scratch mark. And those scratch marks are from the printhead moving and the scratched surface of paper. And I start getting the pizza wheel marks. In the real production, this is going to ruin the because each page of a transfer paper costs money. That was the mate plus zero. Now let's see mate plus 20. And we can see the pizza wheel marks and printhead strike marks. You can see the paper is still not dry, still warped. And when it goes to print, it is either scratched by the moving printhead, or it got pressed down on the left mark by the pizza wheel. The first solution is simple. We just reduce the amount of ink put on the paper. When we also control the printing time, so we make a printer print slower, so give the paper a little bit more time to dry. We still choose to mate and high quality. However, in the maintenance, we just decrease the ink level to negative 50%. Okay, here's a mate, density negative 50. It's much better than the plain paper that you can use. Of course, it's not as good as the mate at the density zero. Of course, you can tweak the density and tweak it a little bit higher if your paper can tolerate it. Furthermore, in the same printing dialogue, if you go to more options, we can turn off the high speed. Okay, what this is, the high speed is when the printhead moves back, does it print. If you turn it off, you can see the printhead doesn't print on the way back. They only print on the way forward. This way, you can reduce the speed of printing, so give the paper a little bit more time to dry. To summarize this first solution, if we got this mate working and high quality, that's going to preserve the vibrant color. And we turn off the high speed, so give the paper more time to dry, so decrease the printhead scratching problem. And in the maintenance, we decreased the ink volume by 50%. And then you can print at a little bit higher percent, like a negative 40, negative 30, and all the way up, see how much paper can take. Okay, I can move to a method two without showing something crazy. Every Epson has a door trigger that if you leave the scanner door, it's going to stop the printer from printing. Here, I just use a piece of napkin, just jam the sensor. So in the middle of the printing, I'm going to remove that piece of napkin, let the printer stop. You can see it's about to touch the pizza wheel. Now, you can give the printer more time to dry. And when it's dry, you can just insert the napkin back and go back to printing. To speed it up, I'm going to use a leaf blower. Actually, I tried the hair dryer before, and the problem is the hair dryer dried up the printhead, so I got a clog printhead. And so I just keep using the leaf blower. And I blow in the way away from the printhead. I found this way, it never clogs my printhead. So I've been keeping doing this. I also count how many times the printhead moved. So I normally do five to six times, then I start blowing. Of course, I don't do this for every single sublimation transfer. I do this when I wanted the mid plus 20, the maximum. Also, I only do this for the image that's important, such as my son's hockey team logo. Okay, here's your perfect mid plus 20 that no other people can produce. Remember, we're going to get a scratch marks even at mid zero. In the next video, if I have time to do it, we're going to take this wheel off. It's not as simple as sounds. Firstly, the function of the wheel is to press the paper down. So you need something to keep the paper down and flat. Secondly, there's a PIS sensor on the wheel, and lots of them are built into the wheel. So you need to deal with that sensor. In your nutshell, we're going to have a platform underneath the paper. So the platform have little holes to suck the air in. Those are connected to a regular house vacuum. So if you have a house vacuum, you just take the hose out, connect to this adapter. Here's where the platform will reside. So the paper will be pressed down by the air pressure rather than the piece of wheel, and actually not pressed, it can suck on the platform, so it will stay flat. Hope I won't get too busy and can shoot a second one. I hope you enjoyed this video. Visit us at www.bchtechnologies.com or locally at Greensboro, North Carolina. Cheers!