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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.


  • When you run into something vocabulary wise you don’t understand, Google is your friend just keep googling and reading to get the gist, Google any error messages too, I’m 43, I’ve been googling my whole life as a big fraud in IT, jk

    But seriously Google Google Google has all the answers and as you use it more you hone your search skills to the point where you just scroll past the crap and wham find things right away. The more you search and work with the stuff the better you’ll get way more comfortable. Maybe try and find a local friend who’s good with computers or search that can help you a bit

    I’ve helped many friends fix and troubleshoot stuff from time to time, but I’m not anyone’s full time IT, I work on retainer.

    I don’t know everything but every day I learn, even stuff I’ll never have to use again.

    I do IT consulting Reiners.io , if you want paid help no problem, but it does turn into a huge free time sink, with no reward.

    Source: retired 15 year Linux systems engineer and sysadmin, turned consultant at https://reiners.io $60/hr minimum I charge clients much more, including my old boss, who’s at $110/h but I bring my laptop to Hawaii for that guy, so he pays for access to me in 80 hr blocks.

    It is freaking expensive and few people will want to do it for free.