pisquee
31-12-2013, 03:22 PM
Had a bit of time last night to finally play with the HeatJet and work some things out.
Up til now it's been a bit of guess work, but most things seem to have printed find whatever we did, but now we have some suedette and fleece to print and these didn't 'just work' They would print, but not properly - the colours would be faded, although all the ink was seemingly released form the paper.
Up til this point we've kept the temperature at 200 degrees C, and played with fast and slow speeds, which for most fabrics works fine.
For the suede and fleece though, it didn't. It tried different speed settings, and taking the temp up to 210 and then 220 and the prints go more faded as the temp went up. Remembering from the InkTec documentation that the inks will sublimate from 160 degrees, I took the temp down to 170 and the print was perfect, which surprised me, as I'd always thought more temp the better if nothing was seeming to burn, but apparently not.
Speed wise, although the dial goes from 0 to 8, all the play of speed (on our machine at least) seems to be between 3 and 5. Below 3 it hardly or doesn't move at all, and it doesn't speed up any above 5. I think maybe at some point the pot was replaced with the wrong one - maybe it is now a log pot instead of a linear one?
Anyways, by putting a piece of standard A4 copier paper through the machine, I timed the length of time it takes for something to go through the machine, and ended up at a speed of 3.75 is the equivalent of am approximate 1 minute pressing, which is usually what we aim for in the flat bed presses.
So, before, we were either pressing at around 2.5 minutes or 30 seconds per print at 200 degrees, we're now set at 1 minute and 170 degrees and are happy to not be guessing anymore.
Up til now it's been a bit of guess work, but most things seem to have printed find whatever we did, but now we have some suedette and fleece to print and these didn't 'just work' They would print, but not properly - the colours would be faded, although all the ink was seemingly released form the paper.
Up til this point we've kept the temperature at 200 degrees C, and played with fast and slow speeds, which for most fabrics works fine.
For the suede and fleece though, it didn't. It tried different speed settings, and taking the temp up to 210 and then 220 and the prints go more faded as the temp went up. Remembering from the InkTec documentation that the inks will sublimate from 160 degrees, I took the temp down to 170 and the print was perfect, which surprised me, as I'd always thought more temp the better if nothing was seeming to burn, but apparently not.
Speed wise, although the dial goes from 0 to 8, all the play of speed (on our machine at least) seems to be between 3 and 5. Below 3 it hardly or doesn't move at all, and it doesn't speed up any above 5. I think maybe at some point the pot was replaced with the wrong one - maybe it is now a log pot instead of a linear one?
Anyways, by putting a piece of standard A4 copier paper through the machine, I timed the length of time it takes for something to go through the machine, and ended up at a speed of 3.75 is the equivalent of am approximate 1 minute pressing, which is usually what we aim for in the flat bed presses.
So, before, we were either pressing at around 2.5 minutes or 30 seconds per print at 200 degrees, we're now set at 1 minute and 170 degrees and are happy to not be guessing anymore.