Sweatshirt and Fleece Printing Tips and Tricks

[zanegun08]

Truth is we suck at printing sweatshirts.  It's embarrassing, but I'd like to change that.

We are having problems with roughness, fibrillation, registration, shrinkage, color opacity, mottling, you name it we have it.

Can anyone provide some tricks and tips to printing fleece, and what you do differently than printing tees?

[im_mcguire]

For us, we started running all fleece through the dryer to get out moisture from the garment.
Next we just recently got a tip of using a ink clean up card to move around the web adhesive to give a better overall cover to the platen.
We always go well beyond the image on our stroke to make sure the screen snaps off of the garment rather than the table lowering, or the print head lifting off of the image.
We started running slower on our stroke, and with the combination of the above, it has really helped.
We always run a 150 s mesh for our base pin these as well.  This has really helped us tremendously.

Those are just a couple of things we have done to help with our fleece.  But we can always improve more as well.

[RICK STEFANICK]

-off contact is important and different than tees
- proper tack is important
- squeegie selection and print speed. the screen must sheer the garment
- we tend to run lower mesh on fleece
- double stroking pulls up the fibers.doesn't mat them down as some may think
- flash times are usually less
- run a lint screen to mat out the garment is a option

[Northland]

A 10 second hit on the heat press (at 300 degrees) will smooth out a rough print.
Use a sheet of craft-paper (between the garment and the top element) to prevent the ink from getting glossy.
Use a Teflon sheet if you're going for a glossy ink look.

I seem to use a full can of web mist for every 50 hoodies.

If you have a bad print.... give it a try, until you get the other variables worked out.

[Sbrem]

Other than re-tacking more often, and slightly higher off contact, lower, slower flashing, we don't have any issues. As mentioned, a heat press can flatten out the occasional mountain range if it happens.

Steve

[kirkwad]

Everything everybody said & if you have a big order & don't want to send them down the dryer or heat press them all first, you can flash them & hit it with a flattener screen to get a little pre-shrinkage & fiber matte down before printing your first color. Also said already, but proper off-contact is a huge culprit of bad fleece prints.

[Nation03]

Spreading the tack with the cleanup card works nicely and makes it easier to snap the sweatshirts off the pallet. I'm using an IR flash currently and I usually bump the heat down about 15% and do a much quicker flash. I just did a 3 color print on some Independent hoods that stayed in register without any issues and printed nice and flat without any flattening screen. Granted, they are a nicer fleece than a typical Gildan. I've been needing to double stroke pretty much everything on the new press. I'm going to try some new squeegee blades and see how that works.

[mimosatexas]

For tight reg, the preflash really does help. We just apply web tac every print, sucks but mitigates errors. Roller squee helps after the base. Long print stroke helps mitigate ghosting. Single stroke only on everything.

[zanegun08]

Thanks for the tips.

Having IR flashes, I think we are overheating, along with not adjusting for proper off contact, slower stroke speeds, or going far enough past the prints.

Want to avoid pre-shrinking in the dryer but if it avoids just a few poor quality prints the high cost of the garment offsets the extra labor involved.

Will try to take these tips and apply some. 

Our main issue is that the prints just feel like sandpaper, of course could post heat press them, but that is a band-aid for poor printing in the first place and extra labor I'd like to avoid.

[Nation03]

For tight reg, the preflash really does help. We just apply web tac every print, sucks but mitigates errors. Roller squee helps after the base. Long print stroke helps mitigate ghosting. Single stroke only on everything.

Any tips on how to get a single stroke for the base? I know AC print heads probably help. I was considering doing a hard flood/fill stroke to help get the screen to clear in one try.

[chubsetc]

I've found on my air head Diamondback a double bevel squeegee will help you to clear with one stroke.  Don't print without them now.

[mimosatexas]

We run almost 100% thin thread mesh and print white with 55/90/55 blades at 0%. On our sabre we are usually printing between 20 and 30 psi depending on where we are in a run (less psi as the pallets and ink warm up to retain opacity). Don't get me wrong, there are days we double stroke stuff, but with fleece single stroke looks fine 95% of the time and I have pretty high standards for opacity and print finish. Fleece prints are rougher than a thin cotton shirt, but they shouldn't feel like sandpaper, and running a roller squeegee helps for sure.

[mimosatexas]

Funny you mentioned the double bevel. We were just talking about getting some to test earlier this week.

[Nation03]

Okay cool, good to know. I'm mostly thin thread over here as well. 150-S is very close to clearing on one stroke but not quite enough. I tried a hard flood yesterday with better results but I don't want to risk ghost/shadowing the print. I'm still using the stock squeegees though so I gotta change those out asap.

[mimosatexas]

Changing the squeegee should help massively. We usually underbase with a 135S. I'm getting some screens soon with a sefar 123/55 mesh that I'm excited about. I really want to test out the 100/54 mesh Murakami offers, but my local stretching guy doesn't have it and murakami is apparently backordered on it or something. On some shirts we can get a one hit white that is beautiful with the 135S and it holds plenty of detail for most of our work so we haven't seen a reason to increase mesh count "just because". We also find it faster on some runs with tonal halftone bases and solid text to run 2 bases, one on 135S and the tonals on a 225S, press space allowing. We run wet on wet with the higher mesh first.