hawrai

1st I like to thank all that have tried to help me on this forum with my Anajet. I have decided its not for me, the straw that broke the camels back was on top of my other issues, one of the white ink tubes has finally blocked. I followed all instructions to the letter from the sales rep but have had very mixed and problematic journey with this printer - but when it did work, it was good!

I would like to leave a small tip to anyone wanting to buy an Anajet....YOU MUST PRINT ON DARK GARMENTS EVERYDAY...a day of not using white ink will cause you problems I promise...I thought on days I am not using it, a simple head clean and purge was enough, but not with my printer!

Oh well, back to learning about traditional messy screen printing

 

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InkedApparel

I wont buy a DTG printer...I like screen printing the old fashion way...I like to get in there and feel and smell the print...the ink...the shirt....the screen wash....call me crasy but I actually enjoy it......

dont give up.....keep on keepin on......work thru the struggles...they will only make you a better printer......

Inked

__________________
Inked Apparel Direct
custom screen printing

 

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ken692

ok take it from me, I to felt like giving up.
its recommended that you put the cleaning fluid in the white if your not going to print at least 4 or 5 black shirts.
it really is not a lot of ink in the lines, but you just cant leave it in there. now that sead. I feel the sales people leave out key details, heck if everyone that screws up had to pay me I too would give BAD info.
I cant wait for the class action against the hostile actions of the company. I will be right there. I wish I knew then what I know now, I still like the system but dont appreciate the miss guided info I got from the owner the techs and especially the sales people. with there run a print clean every day, thats just bull shirt. dont give up. it will work , just ask us not them

 

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raise

White ink is difficult no doubt. You can be profitable and effective with CMYK prints though with much less headache in my opinon.

 

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4bagger

I agree with raise that white is tough. I only do CMYK prints right now on my T-jet 3 and it works well. Eliminating white will eliminate a lot of headaches. I figure that with how fast the ink science is improving that one day in the near future there will be a good solution to the white dilema on DTG printers. Until then I use my T3 for special stuff but mainly for design development then I farm out longer runs to screen print. Som e of the sales people really need to take a hard look at how they are marketing these things. US Screen Print learned the hard way that consumers don't like to be misled.

 

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ninjabuddha

Is this true? upon printing with white ink, you will have to continuously print with the white ink or the tubes will be clogged? i personally do not have a printer yet, but i have been soaking up as much information as i possibly can on the anajet printers, and ive read that daily maintenance should be fine in this situation.

would i be able to say--print 5 shirts with white ink and then not print with white ink for a week or 2? i would obviously do the necessary maintenance and cleaning in between. i am assuming that one should fully cleanse the printer, wash out the tubes, and get rid of any ink lingering in the printer when you are finished printing, correct?

 

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raise

Quote: Originally Posted by ninjabuddha Is this true? upon printing with white ink, you will have to continuously print with the white ink or the tubes will be clogged? i personally do not have a printer yet, but i have been soaking up as much information as i possibly can on the anajet printers, and ive read that daily maintenance should be fine in this situation. would i be able to say--print 5 shirts with white ink and then not print with white ink for a week or 2? i would obviously do the necessary maintenance and cleaning in between. i am assuming that one should fully cleanse the printer, wash out the tubes, and get rid of any ink lingering in the printer when you are finished printing, correct?

When we have white ink loaded in our Anajet, we do one head clean in the morning and one at night before leaving the machine for 8 hours. We also print at least 3 shirts with a 10in x 12in underbase through out the workday.

This has kept our machine from clogging up and being ready to print when we need it.

 

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hawrai

Maintenance by itself is definitely NOT enough..this the the problem I had, the rep simply did not mention this to me..he made it sound like as long as I do a head clean and a ink charge each day, I do not need to print on white everyday. So I have kept the machine at home rather than office because of this, as Im not there every day.

At present I just cannot print every day as our shop is not ready..even then I would not be printing white every day, we are going to be a boutique rather than printing for individuals that come in with their designs..and based on the reps comments I thought as long as I do head clean daily, printing on white every 3 or so days would be enough..Had I known this is not true, I would not have invested.

As mentioned earlier all I have done is waste lots of ink.

 

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23spiderman

You won't get your money back by selling now. Just put CMYK in all 8 channels and print light colored shirts. There is still plenty of profit in full-color DTG printing on light shirts. Otherwise, you'll be stuck with spot color (unless you know how to do 4-color process screen printing), burning screens, cleaning screening, no short runs, etc.

We do screen printing as well, and I love the full color advantages of my Anajet along with being able to do 1-5 shirts easily.

I currently have had white ink in my machine for over 2 weeks with no clogging. I keep my humidity high, and I realize it's hard to compare this situation apples-to-apples with all the different variables, but I'm not sure it's worth selling your machine.

With your business plan, you may have been better off contracting your printing with other printers, but now that you have already invested in the Anajet, try going CMYK only and see if you can't make some money.

 

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4bagger

I am not familiar with Anajet but I have a T-jet 3 with a bulk system and I only run 4 channels of color. I put distilled water in the 4 white lines as it is cheaper than running another 4 lines of ink or cleaning solution. For my prints I don't need the enhanced color of 4 additional color lines.

 

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23spiderman

Quote: Originally Posted by 4bagger I am not familiar with Anajet but I have a T-jet 3 with a bulk system and I only run 4 channels of color. I put distilled water in the 4 white lines as it is cheaper than running another 4 lines of ink or cleaning solution. For my prints I don't need the enhanced color of 4 additional color lines.

There's no enhancement of color. Instead of using 4 channels, you use 8, which uses less ink out of each cartridge. The end result is the same. There may be a small benefit by having more nozzles that are firing, so when one gets clogged it isn't as big of a deal.

 

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zoom_monster

More saturation with a finer dot or faster speed with a larger dot, because you are esentially putting down twice the ink at the same dot or level setting.

Rai, back to you...This isn't for everybody, and screenprinting can be better for certain print situations. If you are not getting what you planned for, you could step back and get stuff done the way it needs to work for you. Perhaps you'll figure out how to use this process in the future.

 

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cadart

I agree 100% with you hawrai. We've had a blazer for 2 years now and it sits a lot of the time which means disaster for the printhead. We're on printhead # 2 with about 600 shirts yielded from the first head. cleaning and purging is not enough, right now i have distilled water with cleaning fluid in the lines and we'll see how that goes. we use the machine mostly for baseball season here and than odds and ends. Love to print on darks because it looks great when it works, but don't have the work for everyday use and it will eventually clog. CYMK printing is fine but doesn't have that wow factor.
live and learn - we still need to pay for it.

 

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ninjabuddha

The impression I am getting is that you will run into clogging if you do not print "EVERYDAY". is that with just the white ink? or any ink? Just starting out, I wasn't planning on printing every day.

Bare with me, because I'm just getting my feet wet into DTG printing, and I'm trying to soak up as much information before I purchase a printer.

I keep hearing how you have to print every day to keep the tubes from clogging up (mainly the white ink) due to some kind of substance in the white ink. If you print every day, the ink keeps moving, thus making it hard for the particles in the white ink to settle and clog.

There are standard maintenance procedures to keep the printhead clean. I am assuming there should be some kind of "checklist" to clean out all the ink in the tubes, wipe down the printhead, and basically a whole system clean up. Because to expect someone to print every single day is kind of turning me away from this. I am fascinated by the idea of printing, but to have to print every day just to keep the machine alive, is very troublesome.

Again, these are just some impressions that I have been getting. I may be wrong. Please correct me if I am. I don't want to rely on all the information from Anajet techs, and I know they always leave stuff out.

Is there a way to do a complete system clean so you can let the printer sit for X-amount of days without having to print?

 

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23spiderman

Ninja - If you know you're not going to print for several days, you could just fill all your lines with cleaning fluid. However, this would waste a decent amount of ink unless you're able to bunch up all your orders. You wouldn't want to do this every other day.

I've learned my machine well enough to know that I can leave ink in my system. My variables (humidity, production, maintenence, etc.) have allowed me to go days without touching my Anajet, and after 5-10 minutes I'm printing again. This includes white ink as well. I have had one serious clog with white ink, but once I learned how to fix it, it was no problem.

I would recommend a few extra dampers, one extra set of tubes, and a syringe with nozzles that fit the tubes/dampers (Anajet can provide).

 

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