Inkjet on Gold Leaf printing - some progress

I am making some progress in eliminating the ‘pizza’ wheel tracks on my gold leaf prints.Here is what I did.
Firstly I used some 8×10 white mat board and prepped it with the gold leaf. I used the mat board because I wanted to run it through the front loading paper port on my Epson Photo R2400, which is designed to accommodate heavier paper or thin board. Secondly, after some very heavy ‘googling’ I found out that I could increase the platen gap on my printer by going to the ‘Maintenance’ tab in the ‘Page Setup’ menu. My first Epson printer had a manual lever with which to adjust the gap, but those have long since disappeared.
Anyhow, doing both of those things eliminated the tracks. However, since I introduced two variables into my experiment I still don’t know exactly what is going on. I suspect that if I only increased the platen gap, that would actually take care of most of the problem.
I did get a very faint dark smear along the left side of my second print – so, I don’t think there is an assured way that every print will come out perfect, but c’est la vie.
The photo of the final print here is pretty lousy. As I said in my previous posts on the subject, these prints are impossible to scan or photograph correctly, the metallic surface just causes loads of trouble. The texture in the print is in the original, the photo was done through a pane of steamed up, wet glass.

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