Shirt Not Sticking! Help

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Original Sin
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Shirt Not Sticking! Help

Post by Original Sin »

Hi All

Need some expert advice from you screenprinting guru's. I took my first run of shirts in to my screenprinter to be printed of course. We ran into the problem that the black Alternative Apparel basic cotton T's are not sticking to the spray adhesive on the the platen while printing, shifting after a couple colors are pronted and messing up the design.

The printer tried using 4 different types of adhesive but the black shirts dont seem to grip. My printer has said that in the 15 years they have been in business they have not run into a problem like this. Printing is halted until we have resolved the problem as 12 out of 20 shirts have slipped during the print and I cant afford a 40% fail rate on the Tshirts, not a millionaire yet :D

I called Alternative Apparel, and they said that they have never heard of this issue as well and are goign to look into it. IF you can offer any advice on what I can recommend to the printer to resolve this, or if you have run into this problem, what you did to get around it??

I appreciate all your feedback and thank you in advance.

Sincerely
Jason - Original Sin Apparel
broham23
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Re: Shirt Not Sticking! Help

Post by broham23 »

Wow.. The problem is that you're dealing with an incompetent print shop or maybe an inexperienced printer. You might already know this, but just in case I'll explain anyway. For multi colored prints, each color needs to be "flash" dried before the next color can be printed. This is accomplished with the use of a flasher, basically a giant heating element that is positioned in such a way that it spends a few seconds above each shirt (up to maybe 6 or so, typically) drying the first color so the next can be printed and so on. This flasher is super hot, the one I use is around 800 degrees. If the shirt spends too much time beneath the flasher the shirt will shrink.

Your print shop is shrinking your shirts this way between colors making the shirt seem to "move". It's either this or they are using inferior or improperly set up/adjusted equipment, or as I mentioned before the person doing the job is inexperienced and basically screwed up. I have only run into one instance of the garment simply refusing to stick to a platen, and they were extremety fuzzy 100% polyester hoodies, the likes of which I had never seen before and never since. I ruined one and then used an alternate method to print them, a device we call a "hold down", which is just a large clamp that clamps down around the perimeter of the shirt that will not allow it to move. Your printer sould have stopped after the first mistake (or perhaps the first 4) and attempted another approach, which is why I noted the hold down method above. I simply cannot understand how they ruined 12 shirts before they stopped trying.

As far as using 4 different kinds of adhesive, well this just kind of reinforces my thought that they don't know what they're doing.. One kind of adhesive usually does the trick. I personally use an adhesive that is like a white elmer's glue type liquid that I spread in a thin layer onto my platens. When I apply this stuff my boards are sometimes so sticky that I have to wrestle the shirts off. In short, once something is this sticky it's hard to get it even stickier..

So my advise to you is to run. Go get your remaining shirts and try another shop. I'm sorry to say this and I hope you're in an area where there are some different shops around. But is all honesty their explaination just smacks of incompetence. Be sure to mention the problem to any future printers in advance so if it really is some bizarre characteristic of your shirts they will be aware. Sometimes the garment can be the problem, but in your case, with 100% cotton, I just don't buy it.

Good luck getting this sorted out. When you do make your millions just remember my cut is 50%..
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taglessthreads.com
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Re: Shirt Not Sticking! Help

Post by taglessthreads.com »

Broham makes a good point. It does sound like it may have something to do with the print process. We have had a lot of experience with Alternative Apparel shirts and they do seem a little more slick than some shirts but it didn't cause an off registration issue for us. It does sound like flashing is causing this. We print wet on wet all the time without flashing in between colors (except white under base on dark garments) and don't have a problem with the shirts moving. It may be a number of little steps the printer isn't taking that is causing this.
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