F2100 Is A Cap Printer's Dream

7667 Views 15 Replies 7 Participants Last post by tbove, Jul 8, 2020

gatorGRAFIX

Discussion Starter · Feb 20, 2018 (Edited)

11

I am printing a few dozen of my company's "give away" caps today on the F21000. I wanted to share my results. Printed on my trusty Livingston Systems Hat Champ platen that I bought for my F2000 last year.

This thing prints lightning fast. White pass + Color pass took 32 seconds from start of the print to finish.

I printed on various colors and style caps, even some foam truckers caps.

Detail is very sharp, especially considering that you are printing on a very coarse mesh material. Key is in the pre-treating. Old properly spraying Windex sprayer works best I have found. I pretreated these and let them all sit and completely dry overnight.

The F2100 now offers "half steps" on the height adjustment which is really helpful too.

I use a $20 heat gun to cure the caps right on the platen. Takes about 10 seconds.

I even printed on some 60/40 full buckram caps for a customer today too with great results.

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thebigyin

· #2 · Feb 20, 2018

gatorGRAFIX said:
I am printing a few dozen of my company's "give away" caps today on the F21000. I wanted to share my results. Printed on my trusty Livingston Systems Hat Champ platen that I bought for my F2000 last year.

This thing prints lightning fast. White pass + Color pass took 32 seconds from start of the print to finish.

I printed on various colors and style caps, even some foam truckers caps.

Detail is very sharp, especially considering that you are printing on a very coarse mesh material. Key is in the pre-treating. Old properly spraying Windex sprayer works best I have found. I pretreated these and let them all sit and completely dry overnight.

The F2100 now offers "half steps" on the height adjustment which is really helpful too.

I use a $20 heat gun to cure the caps right on the platen. Takes about 10 seconds.

I even printed on some 60/40 full buckram caps for a customer today too with great results.

That's great work

Sent from my TA-1012 using Tapatalk

Reactions: 1

thebigyin

· #3 · Feb 20, 2018

gatorGRAFIX said:
I am printing a few dozen of my company's "give away" caps today on the F21000. I wanted to share my results. Printed on my trusty Livingston Systems Hat Champ platen that I bought for my F2000 last year.

This thing prints lightning fast. White pass + Color pass took 32 seconds from start of the print to finish.

I printed on various colors and style caps, even some foam truckers caps.

Detail is very sharp, especially considering that you are printing on a very coarse mesh material. Key is in the pre-treating. Old properly spraying Windex sprayer works best I have found. I pretreated these and let them all sit and completely dry overnight.

The F2100 now offers "half steps" on the height adjustment which is really helpful too.

I use a $20 heat gun to cure the caps right on the platen. Takes about 10 seconds.

I even printed on some 60/40 full buckram caps for a customer today too with great results.

So can you hats like that on the f2000 as well

Sent from my TA-1012 using Tapatalk

PatWibble

· #4 · Feb 20, 2018

Wow! That handles printing over the seems and other raised areas better than screen printing would.

Reactions: 2

gatorGRAFIX

Discussion Starter · #5 · Feb 20, 2018

thebigyin said:
So can you hats like that on the f2000 as well

Absolutely. That same Hat Champ prints exactly the same on the F2000. I've had my Hat Champ since they came out for the F2000

gatorGRAFIX

Discussion Starter · #6 · Apr 16, 2018

3

Not sure why my pics disappeared in post #1 but here is an update.

48 caps printed on my F2000 Friday. The customer couldn't have been happier. I leave a handfull of Epson DTG printed caps on my front counter and customers see them and ask about them all the time.

The F2100 and F2000 truly are cap printing machines, no doubt!!!

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equipmentzone

· #7 · Apr 29, 2018

Very nice cap prints.

As you noted, all the shirt holders and accessories for the F2000 fit on the F2100 printer, including the cap attachment.

_

gatorGRAFIX

Discussion Starter · #8 · Aug 16, 2018 (Edited)

7

Another cap endeavor. Customer wanted 24 baseball tees printed with their logo, no problem $16.50 ea.

I suggested some matching caps and here are the results.

First off. Print costs and print time.

I chose to use the highest quality print option for the white so that the white color would pop. This did increase the print time to 2:15 per cap (which for a three pass print is still pretty fast) with a load time per cap of about 5 seconds on average.

You can add maybe a nickel for pretreatment.

Dist Rict caps from SanMar @ $3.49 ea. I like to print on non-structured caps because they are SO-O-O easy to load and print. Structured caps can be printed but it takes a little more effort to get them to fit the cap printer nice and flat.

Total cost for the caps $3.77 ea. I sold them 24 caps @$10.50 ea.

First I give them a squirt of pretreatment. You want to soak the front fairly well. An old Windex bottle or Home Depot spray bottle works fine for this.

Then I like to sit them on a table out in the sun for about 30 minutes (or more) and let the sun do all the work drying them.

Time to print. I opened the file to be printed in GC (imported the background image Cap template to show me where to place my design) and made sure to rotate the pic upside down, don't forget. You will also need to set your platen size to 16" X 18". In this pic I have already changed the background color prior to printing so the template is not shown here.

Viola!

The finished product that I think came out pretty spiffy.

For minimal effort I picked up an extra $160.00 + with my Livingston Hat Champ and my Epson F2100 over the profit that I made on printing the baseball tees. I also gained a new very happy customer along the way too.

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gatorGRAFIX

Discussion Starter · #9 · Sep 4, 2018

printgamestrong

· #10 · Aug 24, 2019

Where did you get the background hat template?

humblehyper

· #11 · Sep 1, 2019

Any tried structured 5 panel truckers cap?

tbove

· #12 · Jun 29, 2020 (Edited)

I purchased a Captain Hat Platen and while it’s awesome for washed, unstructured Dad hats it struggles on any other unstructured I tried. Really looking hard at Hat Champ. Can you easily load anything except structured?

gatorGRAFIX

Discussion Starter · #13 · Jul 1, 2020

printgamestrong said:
Where did you get the background hat template?

Here is one for you that I use.

humblehyper said:
Any tried structured 5 panel truckers cap?

I have yes but they can be a bit of a pig loading them onto the Hat Champ so I generally steer my customers towards unstructured caps. There are so many of them to choose from with a lot of companies selling them that most don't seem to mind at all.

tbove said:
I purchased a Captain Hat Platen and while it’s awesome for washed, unstructured Dad hats it struggles on any other unstructured I tried. Really looking hard at Hat Champ. Can you easily load anything except structured?

The Hat Champ that I have has printed every unstructured cap that I have thrown at it with ease. No problem at all.

tbove

· #14 · Jul 7, 2020

Wondering if this platen would work on flat masks? Have you attempted?

gatorGRAFIX

Discussion Starter · #15 · Jul 7, 2020

Not yet but I have a big mask order hopefully coming next week and I'll give it a try.

tbove

· #16 · Jul 8, 2020

Please let us know how it goes

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