Re: Looks like we will be giving up press on heat transfers altogether
Posted: 10 Jan 2014, 23:00
Thanks Ali,
Sometimes I feel this project is a waste of time, then I see the one shirt that worked perfectly, and realise it is:
1 - the challenge of doing this again
2 - the realisation that I was so stupid as to not document exactly what I was doing with each trial.
I just never expected it to succeed - ever.
Also, sometimes I get the feeling people here think I am trying to sell something. I'm not. Something I did worked, and worked so well it has become my favourite shirt. If I can do it, someone else will. I'm far too old to do this with the idea of making my fortune.
The orange sunset shirt that pops up in my posts, has been washed over 100 times now, and after the first wash there was no feel of anything in the shirt. But I cannot remember exactly what I used.
I used a clear spray product on at least a couple of the shirts. It is a solvent based urethane spray for protecting art work and I wrote about that somewhere.
I used another similar spray product when I could not get my usual one.
These things dry so fast I usually refer to them as a 'dry saturation' even though they go on wet, to differentiate between the other products that are water based.
I also used several water based urethanes.
In one of them I added something that more or less 'set' the water based product and cross linked the urethane, as a catalyst would, but without making it hard like a plastic coating. On that shirt, the lint balled up after pressing and a few washes and I spent a day scraping the balls of lint off the cotton with a razor blade, damaging the cotton fibres in the process.
However, that one is the other shirt that I cannot wash any of the colour out of.
So my recent experiments have been to try to find out what I did. But the thing that has be baffled is why one of the two shirts where nothing at all washes out the colour, did not have the lint balls.
I remember remarking at the time that if it worked in the long run, the process would not be commercially viable because it would involve washing the shirt before a customer got it. I've since discovered that pre washed is not a problem. And people are quite happy to have the shirts I am doing now, but I know they will not be completely permanent like the orange one.
While I've been writing this, I just pulled a load of washing that includes the last few shirts I showed on this thread and they were washed in a mixed load for 40 minutes. When I wash them I mark the number of washed. One is now up to 8, one is at 4 and one is at 5, and all are retaining colour ok. But one, oddly enough, the one at 4 cycles, seems a little lighter than it was, so there is still something not right.
All of these are with the water based urethane, and NO cross linking catalyst. And they were all air dried. I recall doing some of the early stuff putting the saturated shirts on the press and drying them under pressure. As the water based urethanes are a heat set polymer, I wonder if this is part of what I forgot.
At the moment, you can buy a product to spray or screen onto the cotton shirt, then sublimate it. As I have said before, that is the same as sublimating an aluminium plate or a ceramic mug. In cotton shirt terms, it is really not much different than a normal heat transfer, but there's no messy peeling. It works, it is proven, and it is freely available from companies like Flying Sublimation (if you speak Chinese).
It still has the limitation of heat transfer and DTG, there is 'hand'. You can feel it, and it can wear off. But it is current technology and it works.
What I did, and want to achieve again, is to get the process all through the cotton, not on the surface. That's all I am trying to do. For us here though, most of our cotton shirts suffer a hard live and get dirty easily. So we are now making ALL our cotton shirts using the saturation process, knowing we'll get 20-25 washes.
But I still want that permanent process again
I'll post more pics around 15 washes. If the designs can still be seen clearly I will post at 20. But I will keep trying to find what I did on that damned orange sunset shirt..
Sometimes I feel this project is a waste of time, then I see the one shirt that worked perfectly, and realise it is:
1 - the challenge of doing this again
2 - the realisation that I was so stupid as to not document exactly what I was doing with each trial.
I just never expected it to succeed - ever.
Also, sometimes I get the feeling people here think I am trying to sell something. I'm not. Something I did worked, and worked so well it has become my favourite shirt. If I can do it, someone else will. I'm far too old to do this with the idea of making my fortune.
The orange sunset shirt that pops up in my posts, has been washed over 100 times now, and after the first wash there was no feel of anything in the shirt. But I cannot remember exactly what I used.
I used a clear spray product on at least a couple of the shirts. It is a solvent based urethane spray for protecting art work and I wrote about that somewhere.
I used another similar spray product when I could not get my usual one.
These things dry so fast I usually refer to them as a 'dry saturation' even though they go on wet, to differentiate between the other products that are water based.
I also used several water based urethanes.
In one of them I added something that more or less 'set' the water based product and cross linked the urethane, as a catalyst would, but without making it hard like a plastic coating. On that shirt, the lint balled up after pressing and a few washes and I spent a day scraping the balls of lint off the cotton with a razor blade, damaging the cotton fibres in the process.
However, that one is the other shirt that I cannot wash any of the colour out of.
So my recent experiments have been to try to find out what I did. But the thing that has be baffled is why one of the two shirts where nothing at all washes out the colour, did not have the lint balls.
I remember remarking at the time that if it worked in the long run, the process would not be commercially viable because it would involve washing the shirt before a customer got it. I've since discovered that pre washed is not a problem. And people are quite happy to have the shirts I am doing now, but I know they will not be completely permanent like the orange one.
While I've been writing this, I just pulled a load of washing that includes the last few shirts I showed on this thread and they were washed in a mixed load for 40 minutes. When I wash them I mark the number of washed. One is now up to 8, one is at 4 and one is at 5, and all are retaining colour ok. But one, oddly enough, the one at 4 cycles, seems a little lighter than it was, so there is still something not right.
All of these are with the water based urethane, and NO cross linking catalyst. And they were all air dried. I recall doing some of the early stuff putting the saturated shirts on the press and drying them under pressure. As the water based urethanes are a heat set polymer, I wonder if this is part of what I forgot.
At the moment, you can buy a product to spray or screen onto the cotton shirt, then sublimate it. As I have said before, that is the same as sublimating an aluminium plate or a ceramic mug. In cotton shirt terms, it is really not much different than a normal heat transfer, but there's no messy peeling. It works, it is proven, and it is freely available from companies like Flying Sublimation (if you speak Chinese).
It still has the limitation of heat transfer and DTG, there is 'hand'. You can feel it, and it can wear off. But it is current technology and it works.
What I did, and want to achieve again, is to get the process all through the cotton, not on the surface. That's all I am trying to do. For us here though, most of our cotton shirts suffer a hard live and get dirty easily. So we are now making ALL our cotton shirts using the saturation process, knowing we'll get 20-25 washes.
But I still want that permanent process again
I'll post more pics around 15 washes. If the designs can still be seen clearly I will post at 20. But I will keep trying to find what I did on that damned orange sunset shirt..