T shirt printing
Printing techniques
Pros and cons of each T-shirt printing method
There are three I'm interested in:
- Heat Press
- Plastisol
- Vinyl
Charles95405 has a few good things to contribute to this newbie discussion
Here is a forum diary of a newbie getting into the process
Heat Press/Inkjet/Laser printers
There are 2 types of paper for this:
You are limited to white / light coloured shirts with this process.
Plastisol
Vinyl
Unfortunately this is limited because you can only cut one colour at a time. So for multiple colours you have to cut multiple sheets of vinyl. Remember to cut the image backwards before pressing it!
The Heat Press
They come in several types and sizes.
5 tips: how to select which heat press to buy
How to choose the Right Heat Press to fit your needs
NB make sure it has a temperature + pressure gauge
Pressing is a bit of an art. You have to experiment with pre-heating, heating temperatures and pressure settings
How to measure the proper heat pressure
The cutter
You need a cutter to cut away the stuff around the graphic or you will have a white background on the t-shirt.
The Roland GX-24 is the dog's bollocks of cutters, but very expensive ($2095,-).
The GCC 24-LX is fine to begin with and
The Roland Stika-15 is another good startup cutter.
These cutters can be used for heat transfer paper, plastisol and vinyl
The software
Most people use CorelDraw as the GCC and Roland cutters have plugins for it which makes it very easy to send the cutting information