DTG and Foil

I'm afraid you will not be able to do foil printing with a digital direct to garment printer.

Foil printing on a garment is usually done by screen printing. The image is screened on the garment with plastisol ink or an adhesive. A foil sheet is placed over the imprint and is heat pressed. After cooling the foil sheet is pulled off the garment. The foil will stick to the ink or adhesive, giving your your foil imprint. With all of the digital garment printers you are printing with water based inks, which the foil will not stick to. (you can imagine what would happen to your print heads if you tried printing adhesive through it).

Since foil does not stick to waterbased inks, it was one of the tricks we used to use when I screen printed. If we wanted a multicolor printed shirt, with foil in just a section or two, we screen printed the shirt with a combination of plastisol ink and waterbased ink. When we heat pressed the foil sheet to the shirt the foil would only stick to the plastisol ink.

Harry

Derschatten,
There is a solution to putting foil on direct-to-garment printed shirts. You're not spraying foil out of the print head, just adding foil after the fact. You're not using transfer paper or any special inks. After you print and cure, you apply an adhesive, apply the foil, then seal it with a heat press.

I haven't gotten a chance to try it yet (just unveiled at ISS Long Beach) but the shirts are looking good and if you're looking to do foil on direct to garment printed shirts, this seems like a solid way to do it.

Here's a picture of a shirt with the foil.

-Alex

multicopy said:

Hi, you can use foil with a direct to garment machine. Have a look at the t-jet website.

Click to expand...

This is essentially a manual process; nothing special. You are 'painting' glue over your printed image, and then applying foil or glitter just as they do in high school art classes.

There is also the Swinger, which is a new accessory for the Brother GT-541 (by Blackbyrd Design):



This would allow easy registration of a "foil / glitter glue" layer, or a base layer for darks, or puff inks, etc. Fernando, from Stitch City, is also working on a similar device. He had samples in his booth, which looked great, but he did not have the apparatus, itself.

I look forward to seeing how people will apply this creative process!

Too bad I missed you at the show, Eric! Fortunately, we don't live to far from each other, so we can connect, soon.

I spent some time in Brian's booth, watching the thing work. It was very cool to see in action, even though I could tell there are some bugs to work out (for instance, finding that 'perfect' chemical base, which the Brother CMYK inks will adhere to), but the potential is definitely there. With some creative thinking, and maybe an Express Screen setup (that device that makes screen with no emulsion, no film output, and no rinsing), I could see short runs of 6+ being entirely reasonable.

Think about it; if it takes 5 minutes to make a simple underbase screen, and you can register it on-press in a quick minute, then it might not be a big deal to charge a $12 setup fee for the single underbase screen, and have the ability to print dark garments on your GT-541 for WAY less than any 'full' digital prints.

I know it might seem like we are hijacking this thread, so back to the point; this same process can be used to apply all manner of specialty inks, both pre and post printing.

I've been following this thread with increasing interest and have done a lot of Googling around, because we were originally thinking of getting a vinyl cutter to add metallic accents to shirt prints. This seems to change the landscape a bit.

I haven't been able to find the details of exactly how this works, other than figuring out that you apply DTG ink, then apply the foil to the wet ink, heat press, and peel off the non-adhering foil. I'm taking a wild guess that the foil material is backed with some sort of water-activated adhesive, and that we would have to apply the foil sheet very quickly after printing before the water evaporates.

Is it correct to assume that if you are adding foil accents that you would do all of the visible DTG printing first, heat press it, then put the shirt back in the printer? I don't see how it could be done otherwise on something like a MOD-1 or a Blazer. If that is the case, how do you accomplish correct alignment on the second print cycle?

Unfortunately the Coleman web site doesn't give any technical details. You have to buy the product in order to learn how the process works.

Has anyone tested this new product yet? And three important points ... what about crack resistance, durability and washability?

Inquiring minds want to know before taking the plunge

Chuck