C 450 or C 350 Cermaic modification

[zalim]

Hello guys,

We are thinking of starting a side ceramic tile printing business soon, we have the ovens and tile providers and everything, we even have some old modified canon models that cant print ceramic toners, now we have heard that the there are few machines that can actually print with ceramic toner (some canon and ricoh models amongst them), so i was wondering if anyone here knows how to modify a Bizhub C 450 or C 350 so that it can print ceramic toner or what are the parts that need to be modified. Is there some some sort of service manuals to modify them? We know that it can be done with these 2 models and we dont want to buy modified Minolta machines,we want to do it ourselves, we have people who can modify them but only if they knew what to modify and how much.

Any help would be appreciated greatly.

[emujo]

Re: C 450 or C 350 Cermaic modification

April Fools was over 2 months ago....what do you want to do, run ceramic tiles through the machine and print on them??? If you make any modification to the toner my guess is you will thow off the T/C system and wind up needing 4 new toners, and I/Us...Emujo

[Albonline]

Re: C 450 or C 350 Cermaic modification

I think they would be printing onto transfers. but havent heard of anybody doing this. seems that the glaze would not fuse at the tempuratures konica fusers run at.

[907tec]

Re: C 450 or C 350 Cermaic modification

I have seen some mentions of people using C350/351/450's for ceramic tile printing, but am not sure of the specifics. I know I read about it on some tech-board, but I can't find it now. There is some documentation about converting certain Ricoh printers to work with ceramics, and it would appear pretty basic: swap out the developer and toner for the new ceramic formulation, adjust the atdc. I would imagine that you will have to tweak the loop amt and fuser speed/temp, but other than that it doesn't seem too bad. With that being said...I would find a junker machine to test it out on, rather than risk ruining a good machine.

Here's a website that talks a about it, a little: Printers | FotoCeramic


*Edit - Forgot to mention: Albonline is correct in assuming that they print on to special paper that is then kiln-fired and transferred to the tile. I feel pretty confident in saying that there is no method to modify laser printers enough to allow printing directly on tile. Methinks the 1500-2000 degree temps that are required would be a bit much for this lowly 351.

[zalim]

Re: C 450 or C 350 Cermaic modification

lol emujo obviously it wont be printing on tiles buddy haha that would be something
@Albonline
we have seen ppl do it with C 450 and C 350 with the right tweaking of the hardware inside.

@907tec
thats the prolem, we have alot of machines and ppl who know alot about machines and its components but we dont know how much to tweak only if we had some numbers, another problem is that its not the same for all the machines, i know it can be done with Ricoh machines but the tweaking it requires to turn standard C 450 into ceramic compatible C 450 is a bit different thn ricoh.

We have alot of old junk C 350 sitting around in workshop ready to be experimented on but again the details of experiments are missing

[KyoceraChris]

Re: C 450 or C 350 Cermaic modification

< just subscribed to this thread....

[EarthKmTech]

Re: C 450 or C 350 Cermaic modification

If you have access to the ceramic toner, i would just try it;

by totally cleaning out the imaging units of EVERYTHING, the hoppers and the toner cartridges.

Obtain carrier off the aftermarket, ie, just the grey iron powder, from delacamp etc (of similar properties to oem), mix your own measured quantity of ceramic toner and carrier for each imaging unit & install it and fill your own toner cartridges.

I would assume the only issue would be getting a precise enough ratio of carrier to toner but that shouldn't be too hard if measuring by volume.

fusing temperature doesnt have a great deal of adjustment but again, id just try it first it'll probably work well enough for the job required.

transfer voltages are all adjustable first and second, +/ -, also developer bias choice can also be turned on if required for tweaking that, along with individual densities.

[zalim]

Re: C 450 or C 350 Cermaic modification

will work on that one, we have everything carrier,ceramic toner etc.
the only thing is that ceramic toner is very costly so we dont care much about copiers but we dont want waste the toner much so will start small .

THanks for the tips

[EarthKmTech]

Re: C 450 or C 350 Cermaic modification

this i might add was my theory - i've not done it personally before, but its what I would do...

[emujo]

Re: C 450 or C 350 Cermaic modification

April Fools was over 2 months ago....what do you want to do, run ceramic tiles through the machine and print on them??? If you make any modification to the toner my guess is you will thow off the T/C system and wind up needing 4 new toners, and I/Us...Emujo

After seeing that you're serious, I googled ceramic printing...seems like EFI offers a few specialized machines that do this kind of work, but my guess is since this is a plain paper copier transfer is the way to go...you just have to invent the media that will allow the normal "plastic" toner to be x-fered to the tile w/o disintegrating during the baking process...anything other than the ferrite developer will probably be vomited up during the image formation process, or the "toner" will not x-fer to the drum...good luck, and if you find a way, please let us know. Emujo

[ni311]

Re: C 450 or C 350 Cermaic modification

I heard about this too. I know someone that made a C350 working on this ceramic toner. Unfortunately he asked for several hundreds of Euros to give away the details. It is not a question of working or not it is just a try and error procedure. This link might be helpful: Printing Systems | mz Toner Technologies
Anyway, keep us informed.

PS: The title is misspelled, maybe you got more hits with the correct title

[avecosat]