Press not imaging HELP!!!

Hi Guys,

We have recently started having an issue where are press is not imaging the plates.

We send a file to the RIP everything apprears to rip correctly and becomes visable from the QMDI.

We can preview the file on the RIP and on the QMDI which shows us all four seperations everything looks fine...
We then click to image the plates it makes all the usual noise and takes the usual amount of time however once its complete the plates are blank no image whatsoever.

Possibly a coincidence but everytime we have successfully got it to image we have just restarted our RIP and its the first job which we rip.

Just to clear some other things up we have tried 5 different jobs and its happening with each of them. The sucessfull ones are the same .ps files we are sending and they fail and also we have checked all the switches in the control cabinet.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Andrew

 

I have seen this before not sure what the fix is. Heres what I tried..Changed Laser D Modules logic ,power drive boards. back plane board, imaging heads.
not sure if we tried the power supply. In my case I can say it is not the rip because we saved the job to the press to eliminate the rip.
I just remembered I think we fix it buy reinstalling the footprint.....

 

I don't actually have a disc with the "footprint" on it, although the previous owner had copied the entire contents of the HDD over the network to the RIP

Would this contain the files required to overwrite the footprint?
Andrew

 

yes....you can reload it from the rip on the press thu the service level.... I have would have to do some searching to get that info....unless someone else can help...

 

Great, thanks for your help Anthony and if anyone else has any further information on how to do this I'd be really greatful.

In the meantime I'll do some searching and see what I can come up with.

 

Page 498 off the manual you send me 'RIPTOC'. Be carafull to restore it if you made adjustment to your lasers etc. they all wil be set to the values of the backup from the RIP, so maybe it is a good idea to store a footprint first to floppy.

 

Now that you mention it Anthony I recall something happening very recently (2 - 3 weeks ago) After imaging a job I noticed all the plates had very noticable varitations in solids where different diodes had imaged, when I looked into the diode density values all where reset to their default values.

Could it be possible that the hard drive is begining to fail and data is becoming corrupt?

Would you advise removing the scsi HDD and making an image on one of our other PC's?

Also today I realised the RIP was not creating bad seperations as I was able to image plates from one of the ripped seperations which had previously failed.

 

Thanks Marc,

I'll get on that on monday.

 

The RIPTOC option in the HDD menu states that there is no backup directory found in drive F:

I do not have a file anywhere on my RIP formated like: QMCMMDD.xxx
So there must not have been a backup created in this way.

However there is a copy of the contents of the QMDI Hard drive

i.e. The previous owner copy and pasted everything from the C: drive across the network. Is it possible to restore the files from this? or is it possible to use someone elses footprint?

Thanks
Andy

 

You could use 'XCOPY /S SOURCE DESTINATION' from the dos prompt, but I should first create one from your HD to the rip with 'CTORIP'.

 

Thanks marc. I'm going try that now. I'll post the results shortly

 

Ok, I've restored the backup.

its still unable to image plates, I've tried with freshly ripped plates and the file QMTEST00 however still no image on the plates after burning.

Any ideas?
Andy

 

If you screw up one laser as high as possible, and see what happening.

 

Hi Marc, sorry if I sound stupid but I don't actually know what you mean.

 

In the menu where you can adjust the laserintensity for each of the 16 lasers per station. In a previous post you mentioned they were al reset to their default value. If you adjust one off them as high as possible to see if you get some image on the plate.

 

Hi Marc,

I can try that however when they all reset a few weeks ago I recalibrated them all. These settings have not changed and the plate imaging problem is intermittent. Sometimes it will image sucessfully but more frequently now nothing happens at all.

Andrew

 

Ok I thougt the error was constant now.

 

The error is pretty constant however every once and a while I'll get a sucessful burn

 

This morning we tried adjusting individual diode density levels however this didn't seem to make any difference. We've also opened the cabinet and checked fuses which also seem fine

Thanks for your help
Andy

 

We've still had no joy with our imaging

We removed the front cover off the cabinet while imaginge and noticed flashing red / amber and green lights while attempting to image. Once the press had completed its cycle and failed to image we noticed that one of the red lights remained on. I've shown this in the video attached as well as the position of all the switches.

[video=youtube;KBJvwIOLiHs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBJvwIOLiHs[/video]​

Thanks again for all your help
Andy