Retail Quality Plastisol Printing

[Tee-60]

Hey Guys/Jonathan,

Been printing for a few years now, have a nice shop (all manual,) plenty of business/accounts and I feel like we've got the process down enough to put out some very decent work. The problem is that we have to go with discharge and water base inks for almost every single retail/resale order otherwise the prints are just too thick for customer liking. We use 200+ mesh for underbases and 230+ for color passes, soft hand additives, reducers...nothing seems to make it come close to the big store brands. I can walk through a surf/skate shop right now and pick out the brands that primarily use plastisol but the shirts actually feel like something that I would want to wear.

Is getting an auto press and rolling on 305-380 mesh the only thing left to do in order to get a nice plastisol print that could go on an American Apparel tee?
-Shaun

[Catspit Productions]

Hey there, thanks for posting. Let me see if I can help out a bit.

It is very true that automatic presses print much differently than manual printing. And they are able to print much softer feeling prints using plastisol inks. But I believe that the feel of the shirt will ultimately depend on the artwork and the job being printed. Obviously if you have an under base that is going to feel a bit thicker than if you print without one.

In general printing on lighter colored garments without an under base will enable you to easily achieve a soft hand feel. That is true with automatic printing and manual printing but again the artwork also needs to be set up properly to reduce ink volumes. This also means very tight screens on rigid frames are necessary because they will print better prints with a lower volume of ink. Adding curable soft hand bases will also make things feel more like the tee shirt and not ink.

Anytime you print an under base with plastisol or water based inks it is more likely the feel of the print will be a bit thicker than if you could eliminate the under base. Also using dot or halftones in place of full spot colors can help create a soft hand print. Therefore you can set the artwork up in a way that will make the print result much softer in the end with any style printing.

Automatic presses will give you the following advantages in print result:

- improved registration
- increased resolution and clarity
- lower volumes of ink printed
- thinner under base printing
- better coverage with less ink
- more consistent prints throughout the run

There are many advantages in using an automatic press in addition to these but I think you can get the picture. Also you can use a discharge base to bleach out a white under base and then print lower volumes of plastisol inks on top of that to create a soft hand feel. Plastisol inks will over print a discharge base after the discharge base is completely discharged out and dry. You may need a forced air flash cure unit to do that however.

I hope that helps some. Let me know if you have further questions or if I confused you any here... LOL