AndyRDH

Hi guys, I'm a recent Melcojet purchaser... got a used unit with a print count of 246 according to the unit itself.

I did the Melco tranining in Roswell, GA about two weeks before picking up mine and being able to play with it. The tranining went great and everything seemed easy until I got home.

Printing on white shirts is not a problem yet... although most of my designs are on sports grey and navy type colors.. I need to use the white ink and don't have "weeks" to practice because I'm bringing my machine to a big convention next week! Talk about timing issues, eh? :-)

1. What are your usual settings for a sports grey Gildan hooded sweatshirt? Do those settings change if its a black sweatshirt?

2. How about a black canvas type bag? Would I use the same settings?

I've been printing on heavy 2 for both the CMYK and white.. not sure if that's my problem but the image doesn't look clean.

3. Also, maybe I was confused during the tranining session, or it was too much to digest at the time.. but do I need to pre-treat EVERYTHING that has white ink, or just the dark items? For instance, if I want to print a tooth design on a light blue shirt.. do I need to pretreat even the light color garments that will have white ink on them?

All of my images are either cartoony or text such as http://www.andyfuturerdh.com/dentaltease.jpg

Thanks for your help in advance!

Andy

 

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23spiderman

If you use white ink, then you must pretreat.

Keep in mind that most fleece items are 50/50 blend, and although you can print on them, you need a good pretreat base and white ink flow to keep the print looking good. We've tried using 80/20, or the 50/50 with 100% cotton face with great results. I have printed Navy 50/50 blend sweatshirts with white ink only, but the ink does "dim" a little bit. The customer doesn't seem to mind.

I use a medium 3 for the white print, and a medium 2 on the cmyk pass. Also, make sure your either heatpress the pretreated garment while wet, OR if you hang dry, use your plastic squeegee to "lay" the fibers down so the white ink has a smooth surface to bond to. This will also help to keep your cmyk from bleeding. If heavy 2 gives you a solid print and you are covering the white with cmyk then that will save you a little ink. Also, if you are using white ink on light garments, then you can get away with less white ink.

If the "vivid" setting makes your art look too saturated, then try the text1 setting. I use that most often to get the closest print color that matches my art.

Hope this helps.

 

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