Hate to have to tell them how to run their business but...

[Screened Gear]

Gildan from this day forward you are no longer allowed to over dye bad discharging colors with black. The new rule is only colors that discharge the same can be over dyed. So stop overdyeing kelly green shirts with black. You messed up your business by making too many kelly green shirts. Don't mess up my business by dyeing them black.

[Evo]

Gildan from this day forward have your QC inspectors look at the BACK of the shirts for grease spots and holes, as it seems that's where they all are.

[Screened Gear]

Gildan from this day forward have your QC inspectors look at the BACK of the shirts for grease spots and holes, as it seems that's where they all are.

The holes are easy for the QC guys to find. Just look where the little red arrow is pointing.

[ebscreen]

We had them too. I wonder if kelly redyes are a result of less than stellar St Patty's day sales.

[Screened Gear]

I am very careful about checking. I print one shirt from each size first. Then as long as they are fine I run the rest. Well half way though the larges they start coming out with that nice tint of green/grey. There was about 50 larges so they must have been from dye lots.

Hanes your not off the hook here.  What do they do try to wrinkle every shirt as much as possible before putting them in the box. I hate running Hanes shirts. You have to smooth out all the wrinkles, takes easily 20 percent longer to run them.

[alan802]

Gildan got really bad at QC around 08 if I remember correctly.  I was still handling every shirt that went out the door at that point and the grease stains and holes that were clearly marked with a sticker and arrow pointing directly to it were all over the place. 

As bad as they are nothing has touched American Apparel's defective rate when I was still printing daily.  I remember a 144 piece job that had 13 defective shirts and that ratio was on par with all the other jobs we did with AA shirts at that time.  I'm not sure if they've gotten any better since we do everything we can to not print them but the last job we did with AA's had quite a few bad shirts in it but it wasn't close to 10% like I had seen in the past.

[Homer]

so how do you guys handle this situation? press is running, ink is mixed, shirts down the tunnel and then you run up on a bunch of redyes..now what? shut down and reorder/return the lot and hope for the best, keep on printing? thankfully we haven't come upon this....yet...I think I would keep on truckin to get the customer something and and move on to the next job, then work on replacements at a later time...depending on the situation of course

[jsheridan]

simple answer..

don't use crappy shirts for good work

[JBLUE]

simple answer..

don't use crappy shirts for good work

  Bingo

[Screened Gear]

simple answer..

don't use crappy shirts for good work

What are you saying John... You little punk...start working for jak prints and now you only print good prints on good shirts...You and your buddy Jason are now just upper crust screen printers...Your both dead to me....

[Screened Gear]

so how do you guys handle this situation? press is running, ink is mixed, shirts down the tunnel and then you run up on a bunch of redyes..now what? shut down and reorder/return the lot and hope for the best, keep on printing? thankfully we haven't come upon this....yet...I think I would keep on truckin to get the customer something and and move on to the next job, then work on replacements at a later time...depending on the situation of course

Well every printer will handle it differently. I educate my customers as much as I can about discharge. They all know about color issues.  After that its a judgement call for me the printer. I look at them and decide if they are acceptable. With over-dyes they are never acceptable in my book. So yes the job gets taken down and the ink is stored for the next day with new shirts. This is one reason on discharge jobs you can't wait until the last minute to print them.

[Colin]

Unfortunately... even "good" shirts can go bad

[Screened Gear]

Lets make this rant of mine into something positive.

What brands do you like discharging on? I Like AA but I print a ton more gildans just because of cost.

[ABuffington]

We used to put a drop of activated discharge base on the inside hem of a shirt to test.  We would do this with both the first and the last shirt in a box.  This would typically give us the confidence to print the whole box of shirts since it would be unlikely that there would be different dye lots. Sometimes it is wise to order 'prepared for dye' shirts that are all greige goods.  This is for large, large orders, but you can then send these out for dyeing and know what you will get.  We could afford this on our own line of clothing, but it is cost prohibitive for contract printers.   As far as wrinkled shirts?  A solution is to 'block' them for lack of a better term.  We always pre-pulled the order a day or two ahead of print time and laid them out completely flat, smoothing out the wrinkles. For small orders we would use a piece of plywood and some filled boxes of shirts, or weights to help flatten them.  Sure it takes a little extra labor, but that is small compared to a press starting and stopping to fix a shirt on press.  A pallet can hold 600 shirts laid out flat.  Put 300 shirts one direction, 300 the other direction.  The weight of the shirts will help press out the wrinkles and also press slubs into the fabric preventing them from sticking to the base plate open area.

Al

[ZooCity]

simple answer..

don't use crappy shirts for good work

What stock shirt, pray tell, is guaranteed against re-dyes and extreme dye lot variance? 

We have printed on all qualities of Ts and they all exhibit the re-dye/poor dyeing consistency issue.  The only exception is when we have the rare pleasure of working with the mill directly on something like a private label order and can bring this up pre-dye.