Pressure

QUICK TIP JANUARY 8, 2016 BY TERRY COMBS

Heat Press Pressure in Direct-to-Garment Printing – There’s still much confusion about the details of DTG printing, and unfortunately much misinformation. There are two steps to look at when it comes to your heat press.

Number 1 is pretreating. Once you’ve pretreated the shirt with an automatic pretreat machine on hand-held power sprayer, and you want to print right away, you’ll need to dry the shirt with your heat press. If the pressure is too light, that extends the drying time and more importantly leaves fibers standing up on the garment. So when you are drying pretreat, use heavy pressure. As a side note, if you allow your shirts to air dry, you’ll still need to press the shirt with heavy pressure for about five seconds before printing.

Number 2 is the printed shirt that must be heat set for wash-ability. If you use too heavy pressure, it will press the ink into the shirt and mix the inks on dark shirts to give a dull washed-out appearance. When curing the ink on a shirt, use light pressure for the best result.

Quick Tip May 29th by Aaron Montgomery

Heat Press Pressure Settings – Lots of questions about what light, medium or heavy pressure is when talking about heat presses. If your press has a digital read out of 1 to 10 typically those numbers are equal to about 10 psi each. So 10 would be 100psi and that would be heavy pressure. 5 to 6 would be medium and 7 to 8 would be medium heavy. If you have a cheap heat press then I’d advise upgrading, but the best advice I can give you is if you can close it with one arm that is light pressure, if you can close it with 2 arms that is medium pressure, and if you have to grunt to close it or give it some elbow grease so to speak that is heavy pressure. Fortunate most substrates and methods don’t require exact pressure, but ideally having a digital read out is best.

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