Netherlands based producer of textile printers, SPGPrints said it offered its key customers a sneak preview of its new single-pass digital textile printer, scheduled for launch at ITMA 2015 in Milan.
Over a two-week period visitors from around the world were able to view the prototype of the new ‘Pike’ printer at the company’s headquarters in Boxmeer, Netherlands.
SPGPrints said the Pike is based on a full-width array of Fujifilm Samba print heads, specially modified in a joint project for optimum performance in textile printing.
According to SPGPrints, the heads are incorporated in a highly accurate but user-friendly print-bar technology, called Archer.
One essential advantage of the technology is that it can jet accurately across a distance much greater than can other heads widely used in current digital-textile applications.
The head plates in the Archer array are typically 4 mm away from the surface of the substrate, compared with the typical 1.5 mm of other print heads, thereby greatly reducing the risk of head strike.
SPGPrints has also developed Pike Reactive inks, with a formula that eliminates the mist problem, which might have arisen with this greater firing distance.
The first Pike printer is a 6-colour machine in which each colour is represented by an Archer print bar containing 43 print heads, giving a printing width of 1850 mm.
The print bar has a native resolution of 1200 x 1200 dpi, variable drop sizes from 2-10 pl and a jetting frequency of 32 kHz, which together deliver typical productivity of 40 linear metres a minutes, with a maximum of around 75 m/min.
The modular construction will allow models with up to 9 colours and the textile printer producer is also planning to develop wider versions of the Pike, up to 3200 mm.
The Archer print bar has been designed to retract fully for easy maintenance and heads can be purged in narrow segments and a faulty head can be replaced by users in less than an hour, with no need for manual alignment.
The heads are manufactured by a MEMS process, which means they are less liable to degradation and can be refurbished.
SPGPrints has proposed a unique arrangement in conjunction with Pike inks, whereby, the customer will initially receive a number of spare heads and any faulty heads returned will be replaced free of charge.
The Pike’s fabric-infeed system is from Erhardt + Leimer and the transport blanket has been specially designed in conjunction with Habasit. (AR)
