imprint size vs pallet size?

[Prince Art]

Curious to know: How close to the edge of the pallets do you run your prints? And is it the same on auto & manual? How does amount of margin on each side affect printing (or does it)?

I'm contemplating some custom pallets to get as close to our maximum print width as possible, & trim out any excess pallet width. Goal is to change pallets less often by accommodating more small shirt sizes. I just want to make sure I'm leaving enough margin, & not doing something that will compromise printing ease or quality.

[blue moon]

I don't think the amount of margin makes a difference.

pierre

[Frog]

Yep, more important is hitting the sweet spot of the screen with your image size.

[mimosatexas]

I print on the standard 16x22 (which it was 16x25ish).  I print up to 15x21 with some frequency..,

On my press (Kruzer) I can fit most womens cut (except S and M bella/next level) and most youth (though American Apparel Smalls are tight). 

[ZooCity]

I like +2" over the image width so an inch on each side of the platen in to the image.  But we'll often print up to 1" over the image width or half an inch on each side of the platen.

We round the corners of all our blades and since the blade width is matched to the rest of the tooling this gives some wiggle room.

I also don't like printing near the max blade width for a bunch of nerdy reasons that I think Joe Clarke explains best in his material.  We'll print a 15" w. image on the next size platen and screen up for those reasons.

[Prince Art]

Yep, more important is hitting the sweet spot of the screen with your image size.

You know, I remember seeing the math on how to find that once. In a thread here, I believe. I don't think we're having problems in that area, but I might search for that for the added knowledge.


I like hearing that most of you don't consider the margin a big concern. Zoo's comment about squeegees brings up another couple of questions: How far past the max image width should the squeegee extend? And should the squeegee be shorter than the pallet width, and if so, by how much? Or is overlapping fine? (I tend to think overlapping is asking for press lines & unecessary wear on squeegee, screen, and stencil.) Not asking about what obviously CAN be done, but what's generally GOOD (without going overboard into "in a perfect world" theoretical territory).