Impressions - January 2014 - (Page 68)

talking SHOP Digital Decorating How to Troubleshoot Digital Printing Nothing replaces experience when troubleshooting a job, but this four-step process is useful for narrowing down the possible causes of any problems. By Kevin Kelly, Contributing Writer Inconsistent color throughout a print is most often caused by poor pretreatment. If you don't have a machine that does pretreatment automatically, I recommend investing in an external automatic pretreatment machine. All photos courtesy of Blue Heron, Little Falls, N.J. w hen troubleshooting a problematic print that is done on a digital direct-to-garment printer, experience is, by far, the most valuable tool in your toolbox. I've also found my screen printing experience to be of worth. After screen printing for 25 years, I can troubleshoot a screen printed design in seconds. Now, I've transformed that experience into digital printing. Troubleshooting will be harder if you have no experience or benchmarks from previous history. In the beginning, my shop developed a procedure to follow whenever we knew 68 Impressions | January 2014 something wasn't right, but we didn't have a clue what was wrong. This process includes ﬁrst checking the substrate, then the nozzles, then whether we made any changes in the parameters and, ﬁnally, the artwork. SUBSTRATES & PRETREATMENT One of the ﬁrst things you should remember is that you have to be wary of the print jobs you accept and the substrate on which you intend to print. If you want to save time, and prevent hassles and frustration, become familiar with brands that print well for you and stick to those brands. In our shop, we will not digitally print anything except 100% cotton Tshirts, and we are very ﬁrm about that. You can shut down your shop trying to print substrates never intended for digital printing. We recommend certain brands and we discourage certain blends, like 50% cotton/50% polyester. If we get customers who absolutely insist we print on 50/50 blends because it's the only option available in a speciﬁc color, we require them to sign a document ahead of time that states the risks involved, and that this shirt is not the best choice. We ensure that customers are aware in advance that the results may not be what they are expecting. Shirt brands also greatly affect pretreatment, and the proper amount will vary depending on the brand and its country of origin. In some instances, you may have to experiment with a shirt to see what works best. In some cases, we invested our own time and money into doing test prints to ensure a customer would be happy. The most important aspect of pretreatment application is consistency, which is difﬁcult to achieve when using a spray gun. If the same person is doing it every time, he may develop an intuitive sense of how much pretreatment will sufﬁce. Still, it is, at best, an educated guess. If you have multiple people pretreating garments, each person will most likely do it differently and with varying amounts. impressionsmag.com http://www.impressionsmag.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Impressions - January 2014

Impressions - January 2014
Contents
First Impressions
From the Show Director
FYI
Product Gallery
ISS Long Beach Product Pick
ISS Conferences
In the Details
How to Make Your Website Into a Prospect Magnet
Tees Stand the Test of Time
Shop Spotlight
Embroidery Technique
Embroidery Production
Screen Printing Production
Screen Printing Technique
Digital Decorating
Classifieds
Online Directory
Ad Index

Impressions - January 2014