Direct to Garment Printing - I've gone and done it!

[smitch6]

i know it kinda makes you feel jealous when you see what it can actually do
but soooo much money unfortunately

i suppose if you have the customer base and the premises etc all set up then it's worth it but when your still fairly new and don't have many orders unless you win the lottery thats a no-no

[DREAMGLASS]

You can actually build your own dtg Steve if you have a suitable donor printer. I built one around an Epson 1160 printer following some generic plans that were put on a t-shirt forum. In its most simplistic form you are replacing the paper feed on the printer with a platen assembly that feeds the garment about 8mm from the printheads.

The practical problems are that light coloured garments need two passes of the print head to get enough ink onto the garment so you need to get the registration (alignment) right and if you want to print onto darks you need an Epson with eight 'cartidges', four containing white for the underbase and four for the colours as well as specialist software called RIP that controls the process and fires the colour in a two phase sequence.

Type DIY DTG into YouTube and you'll see a few examples.

[AdamB]

You can actually build your own dtg Steve if you have a suitable donor printer. I built one around an Epson 1160 printer following some generic plans that were put on a t-shirt forum. In its most simplistic form you are replacing the paper feed on the printer with a platen assembly that feeds the garment about 8mm from the printheads.

The practical problems are that light coloured garments need two passes of the print head to get enough ink onto the garment so you need to get the registration (alignment) right and if you want to print onto darks you need an Epson with eight 'cartidges', four containing white for the underbase and four for the colours as well as specialist software called RIP that controls the process and fires the colour in a two phase sequence.

Type DIY DTG into YouTube and you'll see a few examples.

Let's not fill Steve with false hopes mate eh!

YES - you can build your own DTG machine and plans have been around for many months - but, as you say, it's a case of getting the registration SPOT ON that is the problem.

I built my own go kart as a kid - it was good but no way near as good as the lad next door whose parents bought him one from the catalogue!

If these things were really 'that easy' to build then surely people (such as yourself that has already built one) would be building and selling them on fleabay for a fraction of the cost.

[smitch6]

i'm not very engineering minded so for me to even contemplate something like that wouldn't happen anyway lol

[Paul]

reopen now

[Stitch Up]

reopen now

I thought I'd posted an 'improper' picture or something :redface:

I have to agree with the many comments about the cost of these DTG printers, it really is quite some investment and believe me, I thought long & hard before I put the cash up!

Anyway, a couple of shirts I printed today



Thanks AdamB

[Stitch Up]

Earlier in this thread (I think) I mentioned that just when I had got used to the software, All American came up with a much more powerful RIP. The 4 pictures above were all produced with this new RIP - it's simply amazing how easy it is to use!

[Paul]

John! you are artist! you know that?!

[accdave]

Everytime he posts a picture up he should provide us all with the t-shirt to ease the pain of envy

[smitch6]

lol now that would be nice
i want to know if Stitch will adopt me so he can leave it to me in his will