So the week is half over and updates from the field have been a little slow in coming…meaning that there are the inevitable kinks to work out of the operation.

However the project at Z Decals is done. And Nick, the owner of Z Decals, is now one happy guy. They do almost exclusively wraps, for cars and trucks and boats, and their design style features a lot of grey. Not even neutral earth tones.

Just shades of grey with vivid color highlights.

If you do wraps and you use grey then you’re well aware of what lots of people call “metamerism” which really isn’t; the tendency of greys to shift to a green cast in sunlight.

There’s a specific reason for that and there are ways to combat it–although unfortunately at some cost in other areas. So I made Nick some laminated and unlaminated profiles with different black generation builds and now he’s got enough arrows in his quiver to nail the bulls-eye on just about any grey project.

And, as is typical with guys running Rolands driven by Versaworks, Nick was so concerned about getting good greys that he made very, VERY clear in our discussions upfront that he was just fine and happy with every other color. “Everything else prints great” were his exact words.

Well, “great” has now been redefined. The profiles in Versa are all made with the same basic profile-making philosophy. And what that philosophy tends to make is profiles that aren’t horrible, but are by no means capable of getting all out of a machine that it’s got to give. We had a set of before-and-after panels we were looking at outside, and while everyone was cooing over the greys, I pointed out to Nick the difference in a red swoosh that ran through the image. Compared to the “after” which was a full and vibrant and vivid red, the “before” looked almost orange.

So where’re all the videos and documentation?

I stumbled a little bit with the Flip camera I’m afraid to admit. I’ve got a bunch of pretty shaky video of the printhead moving and random bits of this and that and a bunch of feet standing around outside looking at comparison images while their voices talk about how wonderful it is to have the problem solved.

So I opened iMovie at Birmingham Airport and figured I’d start watching the tutorials and see if I could paste all the bits and pieces together into something worth sticking on You Tube, but of course the tutorials are all online and there doesn’t seem to be any sort of WiFi at that airport.

So that’s where it stands. Today I’m reading tutorials at home, then off to LA, and I’ll keep the little camera rolling much more at Fineline.

More to come.