I know we all have a different opinion on the shirts we like to wear. I have to say my absolute favorite shirt is the American Apparel TR401 tri-blend. This shirt also happens to be one of the most expensive to purchase… Although American Apparel has superior quality and is made right here in the…
The exact instructions for how to cure ink are “figure it out.” There is no magic formula of dryer setting and belt speed that I can give you, no matter how many of you beg for that information. There are too many variables. Some of this follows earlier posts, but this is a topic that continues…
These days most of your customers don’t want to visit your factory unless it is a “show and tell” field trip. We have found that the days of press checks are long long gone and that even nervous customers with large orders don’t want to visit the plant. Too much traffic, they are too busy,…
Occasionally we make bad calls on the production floor. Recently we had an order and the pantones were all specified. When we printed the blue that the design called for, it looked nothing like the mockup. Someone made the call to print the job anyway… Of course when the customer received the shirts, they didn’t…
Hot market printing is exciting, stressful, fun, and frustrating all at the same time. In the case of the 2016 NBA Finals a handful of us printers located in Northern California were a little down after the Golden State Warriors were defeated last night. So this morning, as our team packs up 30,000 royal blue tees to be…
I have always had awful penmanship. Now, thanks to myscriptfont.com I’ve immortalized my awful handwriting in font form. So, instead of using Helvetica as my go-to font for all purposes, “Tom’s Hand” will be my default font. It was easy…
Q: What temperature should I set my dryer at? A: I don’t know. That’s the best answer to that question. Another answer is to say, “whatever temperature raises the ink film temperature to 320 degrees for ten seconds.” Curing ink will be affected by the ambient temperature, how long your drying chamber is, the height…
Last week we ran a big Ink Kitchen list of reasons why you might not hold detail in your prints. My pals at Saati had a little more feedback. It is their usual type of feedback, helpful and practical. “First, make sure to run an exposure (cure) test and at least get into the range…
Coming up in the industry and living in the SF Bay Area, the operation known as Winterland Productions was the stuff of legend and it seemed everybody had a story of working at or with the biggest, baddest, and coolest print shop around. The company was founded by Bill Graham with the name of course…
This question comes up often with screenprinters: why can we not hold detail? The answer is an idea similar to the art department concept of problems with source artwork where we say “garbage in, garbage out.” We are now are transferring that idea to print production. Basically, if you have a crappy stencil you have no chance…
