Printing on Poly Athletic Shorts?

[Parker 1]

OK have a job, no had a job, printing 2 colors on the leg of some poly athletic shorts.  You know the 2 ply mesh type shorts.  Blue shorts get white and yellowbase under yellow.  Poly white base then top color.  Tried printing without underbaseing the yellow and printing white last, no dice looked pretty bad. 

The bottom layer sticks the top layer moves.  What am I missing any ideas? 

-Chris-   

[Get Shirts]

Are you using a hoop to hold the pants in place?  If so, you should be able to base the yellow with white and flash both with no problem. 

[Prosperi-Tees]

Did 550 of those just like what you are you doing, used clips to hold the top layer down. Needless to say I will never do them again unless I have some sort of hold down to hold them down.

[Frog]

Scobey uses one of these that he has shared a few times Made from plywood and an embroidery hoop I believe.

[Parker 1]

No clips, hoops or gadgets to hold them down and we curently do not own a mannual press.  The job was for 700+ pcs needed by Monday, and priced at .55 a print, which is app. 2 hours of run time.  Needless to say we are not doing the job just unsure as to how someone else is going to get it done and if I have missed something, but after 2 days monkeying with it and 16 labor hours lost I just through in the towel. 

[Action1]

Hi Parker:

Printing on two ply material requires something like what Frog has suggested. We stock a special pallet designed for printing these pieces. We call it a Shorts Hold-Down.

http://www.actionengineering.com/Cat-24-1-522/Shorts_Hold_Downs.htm

Good luck -

Erik Naftal
Action Engineering.
800-228-4668
770-934-1584

[JayzTeez]

cut vinyl works well for that type of shorts.

[Frog]

cut vinyl works well for that type of shorts.

but not always a good fit with multi-color designs.

[Get Shirts]

Or 550 of them.

[Scobey Peterman]

Andy,

I'm so glad you save my pictures.

This type of lock down works good for me.

[Squeegie]

I generally use screened transfers for this.
Transfer Express  is reasonable.
11.25 x 14 sheet of ganged 2 color prints @ 100 sheets is 2.39 per sheet.
Not sure of the image size but maybe you could get 8-10 on a sheet. 
At 8 per sheet you are looking at .30 per image. 
Not sure how fast you are at mounting them but it might have been less than 16 labor hours.

[royster13]

And the great thing about transfers is being able to do extras later on with little effort....I always order extra transfers...

[Frog]

as mentioned though, transfers can be labor intensive on 550 pr 700 as the OP had.

It would be interesting to see the actual numbers from someone who has real time experience with doing them on a manual press, an automatic, and as heat seal.

[ScreenFoo]

They go pretty quick on the manual, assuming you have 4+ jigs for them and you don't have to wait to cool them down.  Usually did 1-3 colors, a two color with a PFP base would take about thirty seconds.  Never did hundreds and hundreds though, I think 150 was the biggest order I ran like this.

I'd probably figure twenty to forty-five seconds each on the manual, depending on how many colors there were, and how quick you can/want to pull--they went pretty quick once you got in the swing of it.

On the auto with nice hold-downs, you could probably get that down to ten or less seconds, just going once around would be pretty sweet...

[whitewater]

scobey and others...even with the hold down does it move slightly? or is it right on?