Printing Hats

[N. Flight Designs]

I have been screen printing for a while now and want to step up my game. I have done koozies, shirts and some art work. I was wondering if anyone has really printed hats and the prints look good? I have seen a couple of videos and one looked expensive and the other (the logo looked to high). I thought about making the screen with 1'x1' wood on three sides and the fourth made out of metal. The metal side would be much thinner to get closer to the brim. Has any one attempted this type of printing, and came out on top?

[Catspit Productions]

Well years ago I used to print one color hats all day long using a 20x24 screen on a manual rotary textile press. We used to get these little hat pallets and we had to glue the crap out of them to get the print area to stay put while being able to push the brim down with the screen without distorting the material to be printed.

Some presses have “hat attachments” and I have one for my RANAR press I will do a video about eventually. I personally do not like hat presses and if you want a multi colored print a lot of people to plastisol transfers and then heat press them to the hats. As long as you have the bond figured out well that is the way to do multi colored prints on hats.

You can also have the plastisol transfers printed if you like and then just press them yourself. You’d need a hat heat press of course to do plastisol heat transfers on hats.