Oh man... I would like to be sure that i'm using the right inks. I just learned a few days ago that all my problems connected with one other machine that i have were connected to ****ty ink made by a renowned company - Lyson. Switched to Sericol - all problems are gone now.
Btw, what we did with double sided was to use gravity... I mean it :) We had to print approx 80 pieces of 2,50 x 1,30 m double sided banners. We printed in 4pass. The problem was that about 50% of that banner was deep black. So i thought, why not use an external winder, even if manual. We have placed an external winding roll about 5 feet away from the machine. We also placed some fans over it so that the ink would dry for sure. Evaporation is the key to success. It proved very successful.
For the second side, we lowered the temperatures from 53-51-55 to 30-30-55 and also used this external winder. What about gravity you may ask? Well, the external winder creates an arch from the material (convex downwards), which seems to be just enough weight to pull the media down - so that even if there is a slight stick of the printed media to the heaters, the weight pulls it. Of course if someone forgot to wind the banner and it started to hang just the way it does when using the winder of the machine, the stick was suddenly too much and the media would curl and the carriage would hit. After two hits like that my folks learned to be cautious all the time.
However, all this was just pretty lame engineering. How about you just take example from the Mutoh Toucan? :) It has a mesh over the heater. Works perfect - no media will adhere to a mesh.
Plus, get yourself an additional heater/dryer or build it yourself. It's cheap.
And - one advice for Seiko - make the heaters covered with teflon ;)
My 100S came with a soft mesh liner on both the front and rear heaters! And I know it can be purchased if it ever needs to be replaced. It uses the little philips head screws on the edge of the middle heater or platen to hold the long edge and has velcro on the sides to keep it smooth on the sides.
I've successfully print "recto-verso" banners (don't know if it's english) by printing the recto side of the banner in the evening and printed the verso side the morning after. I've just print then with the usual settings.
