Images magazine Digital Edition April 2018

www.images-magazine.com APRIL 2018 images 25 TIPS & TECHNIQUES it’s the industry standard. Brother has its own pretreatment fluid. It’s an expensive extra process that needs to be handled correctly. The area the pretreatment is applied to needs to be much bigger than the print target area, and it needs to be an even coating at the right volume – get this wrong and you’ll be printing rejects! Pretreatment can also stain certain coloured garments. My hope is that the ink manufacturers are holed up in laboratories with their petri dishes and test tubes formulating ink that will no longer require pre-treatment. Either that or I hope the garment companies are secretly working on garments that will do the job. Pretreatment machines The need for different pretreatments for light and dark garments as well as for different inks has meant we have had to buy multiple pretreatment machines – it’s much more efficient this way rather than trying to keep changing the fluids in one machine. We have two Schulze Pretreatmaker IVs. Suitability of the garment surface Fibres sticking up out of the garment will effect the integrity of the print so choose ones that have the flattest surfaces and heat press them post pretreatment to give the best results. Working out the best T-shirt to use is trial and error. You have to go through it on a garment-by- garment basis – if it works, we’ll add it to our portfolio, if it doesn’t, we won’t recommend it. The Fruit of the Loom Sofspun T is our standard one that we know works well. Curing Again, there are very narrow tolerances on the ink. Under- or over-curing the inks will mean they are not washfast and, unlike with screen printing inks, re-curing doesn’t work. We’ve found that tunnel drying and pressing pretreated shirts provides the best surface to print on and doing the same post-print gives us control. Real-world production output For A4-sized prints, our Aeoon can produce approximately 200 whites or 100 darks per hour. With the Brother, you are looking at a maximum of 50 white shirts and 20 darks per hour. Artwork format Different machines require different artwork software rips. The Aeoon is designed to hold the ripped art locally, and increasing the size of the storage means that designs can be stored and retrieved very quickly. The Brother holds about 1,000 files, but these are cleared every time they are turned off and require reloading. Even though both machines print CMYK, the finished print can vary so it’s not possible to sample on one machine and do the production run on the other. In conclusion... Now we have overcome the initial pain of integrating the DTG process into our business, we are pretty comfortable with it. It still has a long way to go to compete with screen printing, but for single and low number production runs it has opened up a different market for us. When the boffins can increase output, reduce costs and get rid of the pretreatment process, and the inks become more vibrant and have wider curing parameters, it’s going to have a major impact on the industry. www.totshirts.co.uk INNOVATION AND VERSATILITY TO IMPRESS! | Very fast printing speed | Special white ink circulation system | Print area up to 40.6cm x 53.3cm | Easy operation and very low maintenance | Ultimate flexibility for your business For further information on the GTX, please visit us on www.brothergtx.com FOR SMALL & HIGH VOLUME PRODUCTION See us in Berlin May 15 - 18 Stand: 2.1- A32