Wavy Material

[Joe Pelonio]

Anyone else have trouble with IPI Matte white? I got 8 sheets to run a job and all of them are so warped they could be used to make a model of the
ocean during a huge tropical storm. Warped in every direction. The supplier blames it on the maunfacturer.

[Mike Null]

Joe:

Bad news. This is an IPI characteristic due to their manufacturing process. It is worse on metallics for some reason but where possible I've switched to Rowmark (the golds and silvers are different for both companies).

IPI and Johnson's both have exchanged out product for me but the new was as bad as the old.

I like their stuff because they have good colors and it lasers well but I wasted two days a couple of months ago on a large nameplate order because everything was out of focus.

I tried heat and weights to flatten the material. Heat ruins it and it has a memory so the weights don't work.

The .030" stuff is ok.

BTW, if you have no option but to use it try screws, washers and wingnuts to secure it to your grid, and laser around the clamps.

[Kevin Huffman]

What we normally do with unflat material is use a heat shrink gun to heat up the back of the material then lay it on a flat surfaces with some heavy books on top of them. When it cools it will get rigid in the flat state and we can begin engraving on it. You just have to heat it up until the material becomes really plyable. We have gotten some of the plasitcs to hot and caused the piece to become unusable but we had to hold the heat gun really close and held it there for a while.

[Joe Pelonio]

Way too much work when you are using 8-10 sheets for a job. I ended up using 6-8 pieces of 3m laminating film to adhere it to a piece of 1/4" acrylic that had 8 circles cut out of it. In most cases that helped but
on some the heat from the engraving must have been enough to cause the tape to let up so that it popped up before cutting. Or maybe I didn't use big enough pieces. Of course then you have to rub that off of the
backs of the tags.

I use Rowmark for everything except this one regular job because that's what the prior vendor (rotary engraver) used before they found me. Before the IPI was always a little warpy but this time far worse. I'm going to make samples on Rowmark and see if they will switch.