Tim Vasquez
EF5
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2003
- Messages
- 3,411
My Epson 1520 wide-format printer has been in storage since 2005 and I finally decided to dig it out and get it working for weather maps. I have done this before, but the printer doesn't handle giant paper really well, and giant paper is expensive, so when I ran out of my last ream of 17 x 22" paper I wrote it off and let the printer collect dust.
The printer fired right up with no explosions or spiders fleeing for their lives. But the printouts were blank and it was clear the heads needed cleaning, so I gently fed some paper with window cleaner back and forth over the heads. I then installed a new cartridge that I had handy... though it was so old that the cartridge freshness peel had gotten goopy and I had to scrape much of it off.
Then I started looking for sources of wide-format paper. The stuff is REALLY hard to get locally, and I wasn't keen on driving up to northern OKC to get it. I then found a merchant called gotoforms.com and found all kinds of dot matrix (tractor feed) printer paper. Their #7040 gives you a box of 2300 sheets of 15-inch wide paper for only $49 plus $10 shipping. So I figured I'd give it a try.
As you can see below, the results are astounding. I used Digital Atmosphere as I sometimes like the old-school NMC facsimile fonts for analysis. The results here look a lot like the "real man's surface charts" on steroids we used to get in the pre-1997 era before NMC started moving to the tiny, illegible web charts. The printer handles tractor feed much, much easier than it does trying to feed in individual newspaper-sized sheets, which often jammed and needed help. Tractor feed is the way to go.
Now I remind you these charts are 15 inches wide. That's 2 square feet of map real estate.
Hey, even the NCEP upper air analysis looks like it just came off the NAFAX circuit. If you put a cracked bottle of ammonia there beside the printer, enough to catch a whiff of it, you could pretend you were living in the golden era of forecasting.
Yep, time to designate some wall space and start tracking weather again!
Tim
The printer fired right up with no explosions or spiders fleeing for their lives. But the printouts were blank and it was clear the heads needed cleaning, so I gently fed some paper with window cleaner back and forth over the heads. I then installed a new cartridge that I had handy... though it was so old that the cartridge freshness peel had gotten goopy and I had to scrape much of it off.
Then I started looking for sources of wide-format paper. The stuff is REALLY hard to get locally, and I wasn't keen on driving up to northern OKC to get it. I then found a merchant called gotoforms.com and found all kinds of dot matrix (tractor feed) printer paper. Their #7040 gives you a box of 2300 sheets of 15-inch wide paper for only $49 plus $10 shipping. So I figured I'd give it a try.
As you can see below, the results are astounding. I used Digital Atmosphere as I sometimes like the old-school NMC facsimile fonts for analysis. The results here look a lot like the "real man's surface charts" on steroids we used to get in the pre-1997 era before NMC started moving to the tiny, illegible web charts. The printer handles tractor feed much, much easier than it does trying to feed in individual newspaper-sized sheets, which often jammed and needed help. Tractor feed is the way to go.
Now I remind you these charts are 15 inches wide. That's 2 square feet of map real estate.
Hey, even the NCEP upper air analysis looks like it just came off the NAFAX circuit. If you put a cracked bottle of ammonia there beside the printer, enough to catch a whiff of it, you could pretend you were living in the golden era of forecasting.
Yep, time to designate some wall space and start tracking weather again!
Tim
