Impressions - January 2012 - (Page 62)

talking SHOP Digital Decorating A common problem in sublimation, vertical banding appears as lines or streaks of missing ink in the design. The most common cause of this is clogged ink heads, and it can be avoided by cleaning your print heads on a routine basis. All images courtesy of Sawgrass Technologies. face-to-face at some point. They say you learn far more from your mistakes than your successes. If that is true, then I must be a genius because I think I have made just about every possible mistake. For sublimation, the ﬁve most common problems are: • Banding • Moisture issues (displaced ink) • Ghosting and gassing out • Incorrect output colors • Transfer lines (on soft goods) BANDING If you encounter lines of missing ink in your printouts, then you likely are having banding issues, the most common cause of which is clogged print head nozzles. Like it or not, all ink — not just sublimation ink — dries over time. If this happens inside the print heads, ink ﬂow is inhibited, which results in streaks of missing ink on the printout. Welcome to banding. As long as you are printing on a regular basis — at least several times per week — ink will not have an opportunity to dry inside the print heads. But if you experience long stretches of time with no printer activity, you could have issues. The simplest way to deal with this is to routinely run a small quantity of ink through the print heads by using the head cleaning function of your printer. For Ricoh printers, this is done automatically as long as you leave the printer powered up. However, for Epson printers, you need to perform a manual head cleaning every few days, which can be done with the push of a button. If you need reminders of when to clean, some software programs are available that will prompt your printer to perform a head cleaning at speciﬁed intervals. You set it up and it does the work as long as you leave everything powered up. Banding has some additional causes other than just clogged heads, such as running out of ink. Before you start going crazy with troubleshooting, make sure impressionsmag.com Sublimation Solutions How to detect and avoid ﬁve common sublimation problems. By Jimmy Lamb, Contributing Writer ny form of decoration comes with its challenges; it’s simply a natural part of the learning process. You didn’t jump into the driver’s seat of a car and instantly start driving. The process required training, time, patience and probably included a lot of close calls before you became proﬁcient behind the wheel. The same can be said about decoration pro62 Impressions >> January 2012 a duction. You learn with experience, but thankfully, the challenges aren’t nearly as difﬁcult as learning how to drive a car. In the case of sublimation, there are ﬁve common problems you probably will encounter along the road to success. Each can be avoided with the right understanding and approach, but inevitably you will most likely end up meeting each problem http://www.impressionsmag.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Impressions - January 2012

Impressions - January 2012
Contents
First Impressions
From the Show Director
FYI
ISS Conferences
Product Gallery
Celebrating the Industry’s Best
How to Choose a DTG Printer, Part I
Back to Basics
Shop Spotlight
Embroidery Technique
For Screen Printers Only
Digital Decorating
Digital Decorating
Online Directory
Business to Business
Classifieds
Ad Index

Impressions - January 2012