Advice required on mug ovens, wraps and all that jazz

[garythemugman]

Hi

I'm new to the forum but I'm hoping to find some experts to help me out.......by way of background......

I run a school fundraising business and last year we introduced mugs as an additional line. We had no prior mug printing experience so bought some relatively cheap PixMax mug presses and some PixMax mugs. We ended up doing far more than we expected to produce (over 10,000 mugs) and so went through quite a few of the cheap presses and then bought some other presses but it was a bit of pain with beeps and presses going off left right and centre...This year given the volume (we need to get 500-700 done a day) I was intending to move to using mug ovens and wraps. I prefer this approach as the long "cooking times" means more time to prep the next set of mugs, so in the tests I did it was, overall, quicker than using presses. I was also hoping to make it a bit more idiot proof as I have to have temp workers doing the printing.

I bought a few halogen ovens from Andrew James, wraps from longforte and I had a test job to try things out of a few hundred mugs. I was putting about 5 mugs in at a time and tried every combination of time/tempature under the sun. However I was getting very unpredictable results. Some were faint where they were not cooked enough and others blurred from being cooked too much, some were fine. I must have thrown 40% of the mugs I printed away because of the inconsistency. I was just wondering if any of you experts had any ideas. I feel like I tried everything at the time from less mugs at a time, differing temps/times, adding the expansion ring, on a metal tray, upside down, right way up......everything I could think of. The inconsistency was not across ovens but also within ovens (so say 3/5 would be fine and 2/5 would be no good from a single oven). I have come to the tentative conclusion that it could be due to varying tempeartures inside the oven. Has anyone else experienced anything like this......anyone using an Andrew James halogen oven?

All help appreciated.

Thanks
Gary

[ArferMo]

In most instances the thermostat on the halogens is next to useless this will be causing most of your problems. With just one halogen oven you can learn what the best compromise setting and time is but with lots you will be in real trouble.