David’s Tech Tip – Be Creative

Do you ever try to do a job that just doesn’t seem to go quite right? I had one of these today when I needed to print up some UID labels for one of our clients.

The label is very small, less than an inch wide, and I could not get the printer to give me a nice image without creasing the ribbon. This happens to be our oldest Datamax I-Class printer and it has always been difficult to set for these small labels.

In this case, I was close to tearing our the remains of my hair – I couldn’t get the thing to do what I wanted. It has always been a pet peeve that the printer manufacturers have the datum on one edge rather than the center of the machine – running a small label at the very edge of the printhead is what causes these ribbon wrinkle problems in the first place.

So I decided it was time to get creative and make the printer do what I wanted. I found a roll of labels and used it to place my labels in the middle of the printhead. I had to play with the little plastic label guide to get it to run nicely, but after that the result were great. I also had to adjust my label format in Bartender to get the print over to the new location.

As you can see in the photo, even a wide roll of ribbons runs fine with no wrinkling at all.

So that’s the Tech Tip – make your label printer do what you want, even if you have to be a bit creative in the process.

What about you? Have you had to get creative to get the job done?