When imprinting on thick and narrow substrates, for instance, a glass slide: it is necessary to have at least an improvised quasi-bearer stripe, if you don’t have long enough pieces to make such.
This could be done by starting off with a double-sided adhesive on a larger plate that would fit on the machine, akin to the dimensions of the provided glass plate (155mm x 315mm). This material could be polymer or glass. Then, placing a row of the substrate materials on the tape would make a somewhat functional bearer stripe. Otherwise, if you don’t do this with thicker materials, you will leave marks on the cylinder and risk destroying your imprint.
The images, attached below, show the best ways to make this compound bearer-stripe area (green shows the area of the double-sided adhesive, black is the material, and red showcases your imprint sample) where having an overlap increases the stability of the imprint, so there are no “jumps” where the cylinder could catch unexpected damage.
Placing the bearer stripes at the edges of the area helps to:
When adjusting the thickness, it helps to align the cylinder to the plate.
Since the machine is driven by the plate, having contact between the cylinder and the moving plate is necessary at any given position. Otherwise, you risk crashing your substrate into the cylinder.
It stabilizes the machine during the imprinting process, where there are no large jumps of thickness, which would correspond with jumps with force and load. This will leave an influence on your final imprint.