We produce quite a few banners here as printers in Cheshire, we make sure you get the best quality and many people have asked how we do it, so here goes…
The PVC material is bought in from substrate providers in different widths and different weights and textures depending on what kind of banner we are going to produce. Your standard all-weather
PVC banner which is guaranteed for 3 years, will be printed on a standard industrial material which is 440gsm (grams per square metre). It is strengthened by scrim which is usually a cotton which is added to the PVC during construction of the substrate. A scrim can add strength and stability to a PVC which if created too thin can stretch and become misshapen.
Scrim Alternatives
Scrim is not always necessary. On roller banners or exhibition PVC materials a smoother, scrimless PVC substrate is used for your banner printing. This is to give the exhibition graphic more quality and resolution as the graphic is being viewed from close up. However, there is a third choice for PVC banners. We have decided to use a mock scrim PVC for our banner printing which means that we have a substrate which has moulded strength on the back of the banner, leaving the front of the PVC banner to be printed on the smooth side giving the impression that it is scrimless. The PVC banner itself is still on a 440gsm substrate but because we print on a smooth surface it enables us to print the graphic with a higher resolution and give a really good quality product. Roller banners and exhibition graphics are given an even bigger boost as when we print them we are printing at the maximum resolution giving a highly detailed print, enabling us to print fonts below 6 points.
Rolls Of PVC
The rolls of PVC for printing arrive at the printing hub in Cheshire where print android staff unload the pallets and store flat. We order by the pallet load as this enables us to provide very cheap PVC banner printing as we are capable of buying the raw material in massive quantities. Each of the rolls is checked that it has been entered onto the core correctly during manufacture as this will effect the quality of printing if the PVC has been added to the roll incorrectly and on a skew. Each roll is marked by Print Android staff. The rolls are stored flat to prevent the PVC from dropping down the roll, which can happen if the roll is kept in the same position, however we eliminate this by stock rotation.
Printing
Now, this is where your banner begins to take shape. Your artwork is received by our pre-press manager David Davies who will RIP your PDF file ready for printing. RIP-ing your file makes sure it is suitable to print by our wide format printing specialists Hayley Abbott and Paul Williams. They will take receipt of your file only when the pre-press manager is happy with it and is sure your PVC banner is going to be printed correctly. The software used is Trueflow which is worth in excess of £30,000 which makes sure that any technical mistakes within the PDF are corrected or highlighted. This means we have very little down time when we produce your PVC banner as the file is complete and of course the PVC is ready to print. This is the reason why we are capable of manufacturing very cheap PVC banners and very cheap roller banners and pop up banners.
The Printing starts using an Oce printing press which is 2 metres wide and as we are wide format printing specialists we have many printing presses capable of producing different kinds of work. The Oce prints your PVC banners at 300 DPI (dots per inch) which means you get a very high resolution product. Many banner printing companies tend to print at much lower resolution to allow their printing presses to print much quicker.
Finalising Your Banner
When the banner has been printed we cut the PVC with a massive guillotine which enables us to cut anything up to 3 metres long. The longer lengths are done by a manual cutter and hems are added and welded to give the PVC banner more strength. Eyelets are then added free of charge and we also throw in some cable ties free of charge too.
We then send your banner overnight by UPS from the printing hub in Cheshire. Printers very often send on a 3 or even 4 day delivery but we want to get the banners over to you as quick as possible as we believe in a very quick turn around. And there it is your very own PVC banner is printed and manufactured and sent to you.
Printers in Cheshire for over 30 years, Spiral Colour and Print Android hope your personalised banner template will be perfect for you. Contact us.