Those rubbery silicone inks?

[Colin]

Alan

This maybe a redundant question:  Are you pushing the cross hairs into the ink deposit?

I was always told to do that - as best we can with the print - to get an active read on the inside of the ink deposit.

[tonypep]

You were told right, although this may be splitting (cross) hairs! Certain ink colors absorb heat while others reflect. Ink film thickness can certainly affect the time it takes an ink to come up to temp. Also mass.............a 55 htone dot will come up to cure quicker than, say, a 3" circle
tp

[alan802]

Alan

This maybe a redundant question:  Are you pushing the cross hairs into the ink deposit?

I was always told to do that - as best we can with the print - to get an active read on the inside of the ink deposit.

Yeah, I try to put the shirt on the belt so that it's raised slightly where I'm putting the probe so that the wires get down into the ink and I don't have to worry about it raising out of the ink as the shirt passes over the cross-braces of the dryer.  I hope that makes sense.

[Colin]

Cool.

I noticed a very broad degree of difference in donut temp to laser gun surface temp as well.

Poly garments/Heavy athletic type printing/thicker deposits were on the high side.  Standard clean - spot color and halftone printing were on the lower end.

At 325 degrees with one minute retention, we hit cure temp anywhere from 8-10 feet through our 12 foot dryer.  Thickness of ink dependent (majority of our print jobs have one or 2 flashes, so the shirts are hot/warm going in).

[AAMike]

I printed Rutland and Nazdar (Dow) for a year straight. Usually cured it at 290. Remember that it takes a full 24 hours to fully set-up. Sometimes the white ink looked much better the next day. Also we always used the black blocker on the sublimated poly.

[ZooCity]

Ok that makes sense.  I think this comes down to the cya built into cure temps/reten times.   Also, I replaced both the belt motor and speed controller on our sprint HO so it may or may not have re-calibrated, not sure on that.  We basically run at 1:30 retension and adjust the dryer temp if needed throughout the day so we're curing wb/dc/hsa fully but not over baking the plastisol, there's an ideal for each ink and then a happy middle ground to keep from toggling the dryer all day and scheduling each shift to death to match up ink types. 

Remember that a typical ray gun is reading a cone of air with the cone's base centered around the laser dot, we honestly don't use them but a couple times a year anymore.   I always thought they read high like Alan says compared to an atkins probe.