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| Posted on 5/6/08 at 08:40 AM | |
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People buy aluminum rather than a wood product, because they believe aluminum will not warp like wood. Well, yours warped. You should have temperature control on your flash and be operating at about half of potential heat with exposure time typically in the 6-8 second time period. For thick inks like 3-D inks the exposure time would be a little longer. Your exposure time is probably a lot longer than 6-8 seconds, and you heat is probably turned all the way up. Ouch! Just touch the platen when you remove a shirt. Hot? If it is, take a break and let the platen cool off. The platen should be warm, but not hot. The shirt insulates the platen. The real problem you have is not the platens. With that much heat you are fully curing the inks rather than flash curing. When full cured, and then you print another ink on top, the ink on top never bonds to the ink under. So the shirt may look great when the customer picks the shirt up, but the ink on top will wash off and you will have an unhappy customer. After flash curing properly, touch the ink. The ink should be like puddy, or even a little sticky, but not pick up on your finger. If you print a multi-color job, and flash after each color, then the exposure time is the addition of each time. So by the time you get to the 4th color, the first color is probably fully cured. In other words, learn to print wet on wet to avoid the accumulation of heat. You will also increase the number of pieces per hour you print and make more money. roger@rjennings.com | ||
  
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