Inkjet, Remote printing head info?

I have a ticket numbering machine which uses good quality hand numbering machies. These have become worn and unreliable and I intend re-building the machine with something more up to date and reialble.

The packing Industry and others now seems to use remote inkjet printing and it occurs to me that this may be a solution.

Problem is I cant seem to find much info on them apart from silly pricing and I wondered if any members of the forum had experience of these? Its 4 or 5 digits with a height of around 3.8mm I'm looking for . Thanks Peter

I used inkjet machines with a remote printhead in previous jobs , printing on paper, cardboard and plastic food packaging .

The technology I used was called CIJ (continuous ink jet) , the ink and a solvent was mixed in the machine and pumped to the remote printhead ( 2-10 metres away) ,where a piezo nozzle turned the ink stream into droplets which were then electrically charged.

An electrically charged deflector plate then directed the ink droplets into text and onto the print substrate .

Any unused ink drops were deflected into a "gutter" and returned to the control unit by vaccum to be reused.

The machines were designed for continuous industrial use and even basic units were expensive to buy , €7k approx .

Linx and Videojet were the machines I used.

I have seen handheld inkjet printers used on cardboard and similar packaging and had a demo of a Reiner handheld inkjet printer which may be more suited to your application but still quite expensive.

Hi I work for Linx and I am pretty sure that the industrial CIJ style of printer will not be the solution to your problem, unless you plan on printing millions of things 24/7 !

regards

Derek

Many thanks for the explanations and information--lots more to it to than what I imagined!

I see some Linx 4900 machenes on ebay but but the idea rightly looks too complicated for what I need also look tricky to set up and use?

I may use some rotary style numbering heads when I rebuild the machine. The existing machine numbered in excess of 700,000 tickets last year so the Reiner crash numbering heads have performed well.

Thanks Peter