[metalbone]

So I heard that Blue shirts were kind of annoying. Turns out they are. I had mostly been dealing with black and white shirts to this point but had a customer that wanted royal blue. Boy did I screw it up. Not a fault of the shirt i don't think but i will let you guys decide.

Normally I will slide the shirt over the Heat press bottom pad so that I am only curing one side of the shirt when I am doing double prints. Last night I have no idea why but I decided it would be smart to not do that. I probably would have been better off leaving it be but after the first print showed signs of not printing good in random areas, I went back and re pretreated the shirts and recured. Attached is a pic of how they turned out.

Good thing I bought extra.

So it looks to me like this is a burnt shirt shirt or the shirt is discolored because of the pretreat. What I don't though is the coloring around the letters.

Heat press 330 - 340
PT cure - 10 sec, quick wipe, 20 sec, 20 sec IA Dark
Ink cure - 90 and 90 light pressure firebird white, dupont color

 

[treefox2118]

what brand shirt?

 

[metalbone]

Pc150 ring spin port and company 5 oz

 

[23spiderman]

we did LAT 6901 in Royal with DuPont inks and IA Dark pretreat, and they all came out perfect. heat press is set to 330 degrees. prints cured 90 + 90, pretreat dried 20 + 20, with the 2nd 20 being variable.

you definitely have a pretreat stain so you might try backing off a bit on the amount. the halo on the left side is weird because it looks like it's been bleached. have you ever checked the accuracy of your heat press? maybe it's getting WAY too hot.

 

[metalbone]

Yeah I should not have done the second PT to correct my first screw up. It was the end to a long day and I should have quit before i started.

 

[metalbone]

Man Royal Blue is a bear.

I reprinted tonight and they look way better.

Boy I thought black was tough. The blue i'm finding that of course if you don't put enough PT on the ink doesn't pool enough.

But if you put too much on, you get that weird ink bleed or burn around the print, as well as discoloration.

 

[metalbone]

So after some trial and error I think I have this figured out.

I was using the wagner sprayer - I switched to hand sprayer to keep from putting to much PT on

Curing PT - Was doing 20, 20 10 heavy press. I am now doing 10, lift left the steam out, 20 light, 20 heavy

Ink cure - Was doing 90 90 light press. As I am using Firebird white, I have lowered the cure to 90 Light

I am not getting any staining or whatever that bleeding was around the lettering. Prints look nice and solid.

The PT I think was definitely to Much PT as well as not letting the steam out.
The ink stain/bleed only showed up after curing for more than 2 mins. So assuming the Firebird white really cures in 60 seconds like they say, I am hoping the wash test works.

 

[lkt1954]

We were having the same problem on all but black shirts. Part of our problem was we have an air fusion heatpress that will not go below 20 psi. After some trial & error we found the problem was occurring during curing and we went to 1 @45 seconds and [email protected] 90 seconds and the problem went away.
It didn't seem to matter by brand- LAT, cotton heritage and keya all had the same halo. Currently we using 22-25 grams of IA dark, press pt for 40 seconds with silicone paper (another 20 if needed)at 20psi and curing print [email protected] & [email protected] seconds. We still use DuPont ink.

 

[JCS2013]

We were having the same problem on all but black shirts. Part of our problem was we have an air fusion heatpress that will not go below 20 psi. After some trial & error we found the problem was occurring during curing and we went to 1 @45 seconds and [email protected] 90 seconds and the problem went away.
It didn't seem to matter by brand- LAT, cotton heritage and keya all had the same halo. Currently we using 22-25 grams of IA dark, press pt for 40 seconds with silicone paper (another 20 if needed)at 20psi and curing print [email protected] & [email protected] seconds. We still use DuPont ink.

I am new to DTG, I have been curing for 180 secs straight, should I not be doing that? is there a reason why 90/90? is it to let the moisture out?>

 

[lkt1954]

Our main reason for changing curing time was our heat press. The air fusion is air driven and the lowest pressure is 20 psi. We could not get just light pressure when curing and the 180 seconds seemed to be mashing the ink into the shirt, where as the 45/90 didnt. I think less time on dwell offset the pressure. All I can say is it works for us.