Performance Tees

[printguy]

Had a strange one yesterday - we printed a small 100 piece order of 100% polyester red performance tees; the imprint was a two color black & white. Custy called and said that the white was pink. Yikes, thought maybe we used our regular street fighter instead of poly white, though that was not the case. Received the tees back and in low lighting the imprint does have a faint white hue, though under a strong light or the sunlight it is perfectly white. I feel that the order is acceptable.

Caught between a rock & a hard place right now. Customer wants the tees reprinted, but I'm afraid we'll have the same result. Thoughts?

[printguy]

Sorry, meant to state that the white had a faint pink hue under low lighting.

[mk162]

it just sounds like the coverage wasn't 100%.  I doubt there was any bleed.  If you reprint them you might just need an extra hit of white

[sweetts]

Under low light are you sure your not picking up the reflected red?


RT Screen Designs
www.rtscreendesigns.com

[TCT]

What brand shirt was it? We just ran some Adidas red and blue shirts that came out "OK" but I thought we could of done better. When we went back over the details we used same mesh(110) we usually use for solid poly prints and same ink(One Stroke Plus white or whatever they call their new poly ink) but the outcome was quite different. I almost wondered if Adidas had some special sort of coating or something.

[Inkworks]

Not sure how to fix the job they already don't like, but in the future use a bleed blocking underbase grey. We've used Wilflex's and it was good, but so thick it was almost unprintable out of the bucket without cutting it with a creamy white. Now we have some of QCM's underbase grey and it prints much easier. Good results on red poly's so far. We're running 3000 red poly shirts next week and I'll report back. The white you use is also very important as well as keeping oven cure down to 300F max.

Customer is always right......until their out of earshot anyways....

[sweetts]

What about using silicon ink?


RT Screen Designs
www.rtscreendesigns.com

[ZooCity]

Inkworks, that WFX UB grey is unprintable out of the bucket.  Cut it with Performance White (it's too dark as a UB color out of the bucket in my opinion), add 1-2% QEC Viscosity Buster, warm the ink up before printing and keep it moving and it's much better. 

I'm not sure we can print it at all on our all air gauntlet though, just doesn't have the pressure to get it done, possibly with a really hard blade.  Prints fine on the manual with a push stroke using the above recipe. 

[Inkworks]

Try a bucket of the QCM grey blocker, you can almost pour it out of the bucket.... It's a winner so far(needs more testing, we've only run 1/2 a bucket). We've been using the QCM athletic white on poly too, it does a good job, but has a bit too much puff for some applications maybe. I like the Wilflex poly inks, but they are a 2-day ship for us, where-as a QCM dealer is an hour away.

I'd love to try some Silicone ink, but it just isn't readily available around here yet.

[printguy]

Thanks for all the input - we've printed a ton of performance fabric over the past few years & this is the first time that we've had a problem.
I think sweetts is spot-on with the low light reflecting the red of the tee color. Again, the frustrating part is that we used poly, had the dryer temp turned down a bit, but have a dingleberry for a customer. Gonna try to make them happy - will give it a whirl laying down a little more white.

[Croft]

I usually run Wilflex polymax but just tried a couple gallons of Epic performance white with the low cure temp on some red and royal Zorrell poly shirts and it worked great, we also have started using white silicone on really suspect or stretch performance wear with excellent results and super easy to print.