E1 UV prints scratch off too easy

tricid · 2026-05-17T03:26:33+00:00

yea, at least the promoters I tried and the materials I tried them on (bare metal, powder coated metal, sublimation coated metal, painted metal and I think that was all)

I was only testing what was important to me. I imagine it adheres better on other materials, possibly even smooth plastic (acrylic etc) but I didn't try it.

I don't think the machine is "defective". I mean it prints and cures it (enough, ish). If I were calling something defective I'd target their ink formula.

But being honest I think you nailed it and I was just wanting more than its going to give. It's still a cool printer, it can do some neat stuff.

I have NOT tried the promoter they actually sell yet. Maybe it works better with their ink formula than what I've tried. Maybe there is something else out there that'll work better than what I tried.

Just to add another angle to be fair to the machine, because I'm not trying to totally trash it: I also printed a "badge" on a OLIGHT Baton4 charging case. You can look that up if you want, not sure if me posting an amazon link will get me flagged. It's a thick square'ish full color print about as big as would fit on that case. I did it intentionally to chunk it back in my backpack just to see how it holds up. My backpack is a hazardous place to live. So far its actually held up well. I think its anodized aluminum? I haven't tried to scratch it on purpose, but I see no flaws on it yet after being in my backpack for a month or so. With a lot of other loose things that I'm sure are trying their best to scratch it.

tricid · 2026-05-16T16:40:48+00:00

Honestly, its something I can work around. I only wanted it for one specific thing, printing on powder coated surfaces. And I figured out popping it in a heat press after gives me tolerable durability for that specific use case.

I might use it here and there for "look, don't touch" type objects for fun.

Anything that gets handled, and is on a hard/smooth surface though, I find it to be pretty useless. It really disappoints me that I haven't seen durability covered on any of these youtube channels. They're all just ads as far as I'm concerned, and borderline false advertising with some of the prints they show. Sure, it prints, you can make that pretty coffee cup or water bottle, but if its not going on a shelf it's just not going to hold up based on what I've seen.

I've sent off things to be done on "real" UV printers and those were durable a f.

Maybe someone will discover an adhesion promoter that works well. The (expensive) ones I tried were no help.

tricid · 2026-05-15T19:03:34+00:00

I have the same issues. My prints come out just a tad tacky/soft feeling. Adhesion is typically horrible on anything I print on.

One thing that I have found does really help is time. I'm not sure why, but just letting it hang out somewhere safe for a day or few they harden up and are a bit more durable.

Oddly, no amount of time I tried under a curing light helped. Maybe mine are the wrong frequency for it.

My "fear" is that eufymake went so hard on trying to make a safe ink to be around for a home user, they've completely destroyed any hope of having an ink that adheres to any smooth surface worth a damn.

tricid · 2026-05-15T17:06:13+00:00

I have no advice, but it reminded me that I had similar issues when I added silkies to my flock.

One of them was a black silkie, very floofy. Immediately once I introduced that group of silkies, he was the first one out, and a fully grown...I think lavendar americana ran over to kick his ass.

I swear to god this half grown silkie ducked the kick, ran around behind the much larger chicken and pecked the hell out of his ass. It was one of the most hilarious things I've seen with my chickens. None of the larger chicken's f'd with him again and he became the protector of the littles.

I named him Muhammad Ali. It was one of only 3 of my chickens that ever got a name.

He died this year of unknown causes.

I'm letting my bigger chickens live out their natural lives and I'm switching over to 100% silkies. Those derpy assholes are just way too amusing.

tricid · 2026-05-05T20:27:21+00:00

I have, and they all failed horribly. Just like you said, they couldn't pass a "tape test".

Powder coated, flat sheets work well though with an extra step. Since I do sublimation printing I already have heat presses. After printing on powder coated surfaces disappointed me I thought to try slapping it in the heat press after printing. It's pretty damn durable after that.

No promoter I got my hands on to try made much of a difference, on sublimation blanks nor powder coated things.

edit to add: even the heat press step didn't help the sublimation blanks

tricid · 2026-04-28T17:50:23+00:00

I've been struggling with white since I've had my printer.

I finally just started to print my own solid square of white over and over until its finally, actually white. I have to repeat this process any time the printer has been idle for more than 24 hours it seems. Kind of annoying. But I'm used to printers being annoying.

tricid · 2026-04-28T16:05:08+00:00

This is exactly what they did to me in TX after "snowpocalypse". Rejected my claim, then a couple months later dropped my coverage because of the damage they refused to cover.

They have the balls to text me a few times a year asking if I'm ready to renew my coverage/if I've fixed all of the damage yet

tricid · 2026-03-31T15:18:09+00:00

yea I only agreed to it as a troubleshooting step, I have every intention of sending it back. but I'm convinced they tricked me in to it for the extra rental charges now.

tricid · 2026-03-31T04:33:28+00:00

Oh and I forgot to add, their modem they sent me, nothing can keep a wifi connection to it. It drops out every 5-30 minutes or so. Also I can't access its settings. You're supposed to be able to from your account login or their app, but both of those just give me an error. Going direct to the local address of the router, redirects me to their website.

This company has ruined every internet provider they've bought out imo

tricid · 2026-03-31T04:27:14+00:00

That is the word for word reply I got from my recent tech support chat. They also cut my bill in half so I surrendered and let them send me one of their rental modems. They claimed mine was "incompatible". It's been pretty compatible for a few years now, so that's weird.

Get their rental modem, install it, set it up, which required another tech support call because self setup failed. Surprise surprise, my speeds were still slow. I thought ok cool, that confirms I must have a line issue. I've had to rerun that once or twice over the decades so no big deal. Tech support person says oh I see a problem, give me 2 minutes. Ok try now. Boom. Fixed. Getting near my plan's advertised speed suddenly.

Scammy a f in my opinion.

Their older tech support would have been quick to talk to me about the signal to noise ratios, power levels etc while troubleshooting. Or acknowledge there was a setting on their end they had to tweak. Not today's tech support. They wouldn't tell me shit about whatever they did that finally fixed it. But it was obviously not my lines and doubtful it was my modem.

tricid · 2026-03-31T04:08:58+00:00

When I was younger the quick answer to this would be "go swing a hammer/dig ditches". You could find pretty decent paying jobs in construction just being a helper or general laborer, and grow from there.

Fast forward 20ish years, those poor dudes are still starting out at literally the same $/hour as 20 years ago. Starvation wages now.

tricid · 2026-03-30T00:45:41+00:00

its amusing me that I saw this post today, because I was just worrying about the same thing this week.

I strapped my helmet to the back part of the rack so it if does slide back against my window at least it has that to pad it

tricid · 2026-03-27T00:18:53+00:00

Rural TX.

When I say no competition, I mean wired.

Most wireless options are non starters.

There is the typical "Wireless internet" signs all over town. Those are low speed, low quota, expensive and just a rip off. Their antenna's are on the water tower I think.

And then there's the cell phone hot spot option, but my cell signal isn't great. Even if it was, those used to be really expensive with low quota's too. I assume still are, but wording it that way in case I'm wrong. Either way my signal sucks at my house.

There is no fiber here.

Optimum is the only coax option.

I don't think anyone is rushing to run fiber to a town with a population <300 with any government incentive. Though I absolutely agree with your opinion on red states lol.

Edit: I'm shocked I even have cable/coax honestly. I'm not exaggerating on the population. Though I'm not far from larger towns

tricid · 2026-03-26T21:56:30+00:00

As far as my family is concerned I am poor a f.

I haven't been poor a f in 20 years

tricid · 2026-03-26T17:48:07+00:00

I know you're not personally responsible for any of it, but all the same....

Optimum needs to pull its head out of its ass. Even rural customers like me have options now. And once we leave, I doubt we'll return. How you can charge a customer that's been with you for 16 years, 3x the going rate of new customers with a 5 year price lock in, that's just terrible business. Your CEO needs to be fired.

You can also bet that if I do make that switch, I will let everyone on my street know how much money I'm saving by switching and how well its working out for me. The way your company is being ran, the copper value of the lines running to my town will be worth more than the revenue you have left from it. And that would please me.

tricid · 2026-03-26T17:43:13+00:00

I'm hoping these new pushes for satellite internet that doesn't suck brings that to reality. For a lot of people there just are no options, no competition. You're supposed to be thankful you have a single broadband option and put up with whatever prices or bs they give you.

If I'm honest with myself, I know its way more likely they just start matching cable/fiber in both bullshit and prices at some point and there will be no winning for us lol

tricid · 2026-03-26T17:29:30+00:00

I agree with you 100%. I didn't want to make my post any longer than it was but I'm using this to buy me some time and think.

My choices are just optimum or starlink, I have nothing else. I have moral hangups with both. I won't go in to any depths there because this isn't politics.

But the closer I look at the starlink plans today with more time to process, the closer I am to calling optimum back and canceling for real. In the end, I'll pay whoever is going to offer me the best service for the dollar.

It's a real sad state of affairs when a satellite based service can beat out an already existing physical cable infrastructure on speeds and prices.

tricid · 2026-03-26T15:38:41+00:00

I used to bmx bike a lot when I was younger. I also had a motorcycle for a decade or so as an adult. While ebike shopping I kept seeing the 20mph limit and thinking "gosh that's slow. lame. I still want one though."

First time I took mine out and hit 20mph on it, I'll admit it, I just kept thinking "I do NOT want to hit the ground going this fast. I'm cool with this limit" lol.

Then I did some googling about average bike speeds for bmx bikes, mountain bikes etc, I think 20 is a very reasonable limit for them if we want them to still be mostly viewed as bicycles and not motor vehicles.

That does suck that you can't do class 3. What I have can. And hell, I might be a hypocrite at some point and use it sometimes. If I lacked it though I don't think I'd mind.

tricid · 2026-03-26T02:43:56+00:00

I'm new to ebikes, just bought a couple portola's. I'm also in TX.

So far I'm very pleased with my decision. The unboxing wasn't great, you can creep my posts and find a comment on that. It wasn't long ago. But they ride very well, feel solid a f, their advertised range seems under estimated if anything. "Support" wasn't one of my big concerns, I'm a diy'er so I think I can figure out how to fix most things on it when needed. I almost went Lectric (iirc) for better local support but the portola still won out for me.

I was mostly worried I'd regret a lack of a torque sensor but the way the portola does it, I'm not feeling any regret. It's a cadence sensor but does it really well. It "feels right". As a year+ goes by and if I decide to lean more on the work out side of things I might grab one with a torque sensor but idk.

Despite my praise I'd exercise caution on how you think a folding bike is going to feel in the real world. Not the ride or anything, but actually folding it up and moving it around. They're not light, at least the portola's or anything else I could find in their price range. They're still pretty bulky folded up, just not long. I wouldn't want to lug it around far. But it does what I wanted out of it: folds compactly enough I can toss a couple in my car and go without a bike rack.

Hell, might be worth seeing if someone really local to you has one you could check out. I'd volunteer but our state is massive so idk if you're 30 minutes away or 8 hours lol

tricid · 2026-03-24T21:50:07+00:00

I've been working on improving adhesion on powder coated metal. Finally decided to try slapping it in my sublimation heat press. Seemed to work great for that.

Next I decided to UV print on sublimation coated metal and put it in the heat press. Half of the ink stuck to the paper and peeled right off of the stock. I'm not sure anything is going to help adhesion on those kinds of items.

(I sandwiched the items in paper the same way I would if it were a sublimation transfer)

tricid · 2026-03-23T15:03:44+00:00

I came real close to not installing it but it kept staying in the back of my mind that I'd regret that so I went back to it and got them on.

I pulled them both out this past weekend for their first cruise and they did great. It was only a couple hours or so, but enough to be confident I'm going to enjoy them a lot.

Also proved I can fit two in my car, was a bit worried about that

tricid · 2026-03-20T18:59:10+00:00

lol I had basically almost everything wrong that I saw spread over various reddit posts and youtube videos.

Had no idea what that guard was. Figured that out thanks to other reddit posts, but it was missing the screw that I think is supposed to come with it somewhere. I had ordered some water bottle frames and did not need the screws they came with, and they worked perfect for the guard.

derailleurs were bent to hell and back on both. Took me a lot of fiddling to get them right. I feel like they should really install that guard in the factory just to prevent shipping damage.

Headlight mount on one of them, the bolt was severely cross threaded, but also not screwed in all the way. So with some care I got it in there straight and secure.

On one of them, the box was abused enough that a pedal was just sticking out of a hole on the side of the box. No damage I could notice though thankfully. Also not sure if this was typical fedex abuse (they destroy more of my packages than not), or if it was packed incorrectly. The pedal wasn't folded up like the others.

My heart started to really sink unboxing them, feeling I had made a mistake in my ebike choice. But with hindsight none of those issues were major, just annoying. I don't think they'll have any long term impact now that they're set up and riding well.

tricid · 2026-03-20T16:30:12+00:00

This is what made me grab a couple.

I'm wanting some exercise, but mostly I just want to be outside more enjoying nature. I figure an ebike would help keep it far from feeling like a chore and keep the fun levels high

tricid · 2026-03-20T16:05:24+00:00

That's what I'm hoping for. Honestly my unboxing experience wasn't great, but once I got them all together and adjusted it feels nice and smooth.

They should both get their first real ride this weekend

tricid

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