Questions for plastisol transfer printers.

[ZooCity]

We've always done our transfers in house but, do to our move and growth have been outsourcing them this year.  So far, we've seen that our quality is far ahead of the contractors we're working with and I want to bring it back in house. 

We make cold peel plastisol transfers for poly foam front trucker caps and to apply as private care labels. 

We either dust the back of the transfer after the last color is printed with adhesive powder (trucker caps or poly applications) or mix some adhesive powder into the inks (private care labels).

We use either T-120 paper or this newer, translucent sheet material.   

We have a 22x30 Cameo that has done very well for printing large sheets of single color transfers.

We've struggled more with multi color, experiencing so much distortion to the paper that registration was not consistent enough.  So multi color is done by tacking the trans sheets to the auto or manual shirt platens, flashing and not removing the transfers until all colors are printed.  Obviously not ideal and the paper likes to curl up under flashing and after pulling. 

I do understand that running one color at a time on the Cameo means keeping the sheets in a hot box between colors to minimize distortion.  There's just so much curl from the initial gelling that it's a hard fight.  We do pre-run/pre-heat the sheets when running multi color.

So those of you doing cold peels and the like in house:

• How are you doing it? With a clamshell type flatstock press or something else?
• Can you rack plastisol transfers, as you might on a drying rack for air dry inks and then wait for dryer availability to run them through and gel them?  Does the plastisol slough or slump over if not gelled immediately? We don't want to dedicate a dryer to this and would like to simply up the belt speed between textile jobs so the transfer op could go run their sheets down to gel.
• Do you use transfer specific inks?  I've heard these are only beneficial to hot peel?
• Can you get spot color work up to 5 or 6 colors in tight registration and consistently?

Thanks in advance, I hope to hear from some folks and hope this becomes an informative thread for others as well.

[mimosatexas]

I do 6+ colors regularly on http://acescreensupply.com/product_info.php?products_id=98 with tight registration.  I print ours by hand, one color at a time.  It isn't really fast, but I can probably print 250-300 sheets an hour alone depending on the art and size of the sheet, not including the powdering and gelling.  That would be per color.

Regular runs are 100-250 sheets, typically ganged 4+ depending on the art and as high as 30+ for things like tags. 

We use standard plastisol inks, either mixed thoroughly with 10% powder (lower concentrations seemed to cause issues with details cleanly adhering to the shirt) or with a final layer of powder applied to either a white or clear base.

We print these by hand typically, one color at a time, and rack.  The process is basically identical to poster printing, with the added step of running through the dryer and adding adhesive powder when necessary.

We have done 55 lpi sim process style prints a handful of times without too much issue, and do lots of thin outline stuff and small text for things like rosters and tags.  There is a higher number of misprints as you increase detail and number of colors, but typically that is due to issues with the vacuum distorting the paper and shifting it off of the registration stops, not the heat changing the paper.  We run all the paper through the dryer twice first, but do not use a hot box.

[ZooCity]

Thx!  The "backer" print was one I forgot on my list.  We never found a backer print necessary but it sounds like it's the norm.

One of our contractors we used insisted that everything had to had a 1-2pt white outline!  That's absurd.  But I do see the urge to make sure there is wet ink for the powder to stick to.

[ericheartsu]

We've always preshrunk the paper when we've done multi colors. We've done them on our flatstock press, and by hand, and on the flatstock it's more consistent.

We tried racking and running through our little mini quartz dryer, and found the quartz dryer worked really well.

But we've only ever done up to 3 colors. but the registration was super tight.

[mimosatexas]

Thx!  The "backer" print was one I forgot on my list.  We never found a backer print necessary but it sounds like it's the norm.

One of our contractors we used insisted that everything had to had a 1-2pt white outline!  That's absurd.  But I do see the urge to make sure there is wet ink for the powder to stick to.

Yea a lot of them will tell you that, or that text can only be so thin, etc.  It's horseshit and you can print the same detail you would on a poster and it will press fine as long as you know what youre doing.  I think a lot of transfer places just don't want to freak with the details and do whatever is easiest, or they don't understand the differences of transfer printing vs shirt printing.  You really need very little ink for great opacity, so coating and mesh choices change, pressure needed changes, etc.  I was underwhelmed by what I got from all the major players.

If for some reason we NEED to back coat a design and it has punched out areas or fades or whatever, we typically will do a clear backing with no trap.  It seems to work fine for us.

[DannyGruninger]

Chris, if you want I can jump on a call in the next couple days and let you know how we make our transfers...... I print 3-4 color transfers quite a bit on our press quite a bit just like we would be printing t-shirts on it. I can share a bit of our methods if you want, just let me know and I'll email or give you a call sometime tomorrow. I'll send you a couple samples as well if you want to check them out

[ZooCity]

Danny I will def take you up on that, email sent.

Agreed on how versatile transfer printing can be, we print many of our private label transfers through a 225 mesh and they are quite opaque on darks. 

I feel like most of the transfer places are printing to the lowest common denominator and presuming that someone is applying them under the worst possible conditions.  So it kind of makes sense that they would just want the transfers super thick with tons of adhesive, etc. as they may be getting calls from all kinds of turkeys who aren't applying them correctly and blaming the transfer.

Still, I agree, it's silly some of the things I hear when I know they are easily done as we've been doing them for years.

[1964GN]

First let me say that I have zero experience printing transfers on a t-shirt press. I do have a fair amount printing on a large carousel heat transfer press. Most of the spot color stuff we do is hot split. When printing for the masses (flea market, grandma's gift store, etc) you have to make them as bullet proof as possible, which is why we use a lot of 83's, 110's, and occasional 158's

We can print up to six colors... Shrink the paper... print>flash>print>flash>print>flash>print>flash>print>flash>print>down the dryer. We are set up for larger production runs with a sheet size of 25x38 and people wonder why we can't do 25 transfers for them

You need to know your press, inks, etc. and I am looking forward to printing transfers when our new press comes at the t-shirt shop I work at!