DGP Blog

As I promised in my last post a few pictures of the dryer finished and in various stages of completion.

~Howard

Hello everyone, I am Howard and I am one of the new people here at directgarmentprinting.com.

In the coming days and week I am going to share some of our thoughts and findings with our new Kornits and the Dryer that we had built for the Kornits.

A quick run down  of what we have here:

1 931 Kornit
1 932 Kornit
1 double belt electric dryer

Any one can go and look up the stats on the Kornits on their website, I want to now focus on our dryer.

Our Dyer is a Dual belt dryer, the speed of each can be controlled independently of each other to allow heavier prints more time to cure and lighter prints to speed through.

Control of the heat is done with 4 sets of independently controlled heating elements. This allows us the ability to control the heat and where the oven distributes it.

We use forced air to keep the heat moving evenly through the oven. With out it we would be prone to developing hot spots which could burn the garments.

In my next post I’ll post some pictures of the dryer while it was being constructed and talk a little about calibrating it(read keep it from burning shirts into blacked lumps!)

~Howard

I find that when printing with the t-jet1, reds tend to become dull when the Magenta and Cyan levels are not high enough. One day I was printing awesome red (RGB 255,0,0) and then the next day the red was dull. I noticed that ink level in the C and M were low. So I filled them up a little and BAM - awesamoe red again. I use the bulk ink system from Equipment Zone and I keep the CMYK between 2 oz and 4 oz. But I find that the C and M have a more sensitive sweet spot around 3 oz to 4 oz.

Mark

I have been way too busy to investigate further the building of a DTG using the epson 2200. I am also waiting to see what happens in the industry in the next few months. I have heard from a good source that Epson will no longer ship printers and parts to distributors that are not using them for consumer printing products. Am not sure where this leaves the t-jet, DTG kiosk, flexi-jet etc. I know of a guy that has bought out just about every last 2200 that is available. i don’t want to spend too much time with the epson 2200 only too find out that it is impposible to get parts. So I am in a holding pattern for now.

Mark

After years of battling white ink problems, machine problems, and pre-treat problems; i finally perfected the process. Then I start having problems getting good white. I print a Forest Green Hanes 5250 XL and it look great. I print a the same shirt but Large and it looks like crap. In fact all the larges look like crap. The XL’s made in Mexico, the larges made in Haiti. I found that I needed to boost-up the amount of pre-treat for the large shirts.

So add one more step to the process:
When the shirts come in I test one with pretreatment. If I need to I boost the amount of pretreat and mark that shirt box as “extra pretreat needed”. I try to use as little pre-treat as necessary. So just boost it on the shirts that need it.

Mark

I had to re-install FA and had the hardest time getting my screen colors to look like the printed colors. I messed-around with the icc profiles and could not get a good match. I checked out the videos on the t-jet website. Still no luck. Then I turned off color management, and boom, the screen looks like the printed colors. Or the printed colors look like the screen and printing to a regular HP inkjet produces the same colors. I think the color management in FA is trying too hard to create some sort of perfect color balance and it ends up making more problems. So my advice turn-off color management.

Mark

Preface: Before starting a t-shirt printing business, I spent 12 years as an electrical engineer designing many consumer products. When I first bought the red t-jet, I couldn’t believe how simple it looked, yet it cost $13k (plus $2k for white upgrade). Every other printer that has come out that is based on the epson printers has yet to break the $10k barrier. So I decided to look into the Epson 2200 and try to build my own. So here goes:

Why the 2200?
The epson 2200 is outdated, but is fairly cheap on ebay ($300) and has an incredible service manual that describes every detail you can imagine. The service manual can be found online also (google epson 2200 service manual). If this build is successful we will tackle the epson 4800.

The Steps
1) Disassemble the epson 2200 and save the key parts.

2) Determine which parts are needed and design and procure these parts?

3) Through trial and error reassemble the 2200 as a functioning garment printer.

4) Repeat step 3.

The meat of the conversion process is getting a feeding mechanism that will feed the shirt through the printer while maintaining proper registration. Hence, remove the paper feeding mechanism and replace it with a bed that will hold a shirt.

Let’s go have some fun.

See next post for Step 1.

Mark

Lets start with the epson 2200 in a semi-complete state:

The top cover and front cover have been removed. But for the most part it is complete.

I am not going to bore you with the details about disassembly. For complete details checkout the espon 2200 service manual. Here is the disassembled epson 2200 with only the parts required for the garment printer.

Here are the parts that are needed:

1) Carriage. Hold the print head and cartridges.

2) Front and back carriage bars. Hold up the carriage. On the 2200, these bars have a release lever that controls the height for thick paper printing. For the DGP these bars can be fixed.

3) Timing belt. This is the belt that controls the movement of the print head across the printed surface.

4) Linear Encoder. This is needed to keep track of where the head is as it goes across the printed surface.

5) Capping station and motor. Need to keep the head clean!

6) Motherboard, power supply board, and interface board. The brains and control of the printer.

7) Page feed motor and rotary scale. This is what is used to feed the paper through the printer. This is one of the big design areas. We need to use the information from this rotary encoder to move the t-shirt bed. Normally this encoder is connected to a series of gears that drive the page feed roller. In our case we need to use a set of gears to drive the bed.

8. There are a handful of sensors that are still needed.

Keep in mind that the epson 2200 motherboard doesn’t know that it is printing a t-shirt. It is going to receive and send information based on the carriage position and the page feed position. We need to use this information to move the shirt through the printer.

As a point of reference, here are the leftover parts that are going into the junk pile.

What’s Next?

1) The frame - we need to design a frame that will hold the printer mechanism together, including the carriage bars, the timing belt, the capping station, and the mother board.

2) Once we have everything together, we need to create the drive mechanism that will move the shirt through the printer. There are two choices: 1) a movable bed similar to the original t-jet and DTG mechanisms or 2) a stationary shirt platen with the printer moving over the shirt. Option 2 makes more sense to me because it takes up less space. With option 1 the bed moves all the way behind the printer and all the way to the front of the printer, about 40 inches. With option 2, the printer only has to move about 20 inches.

I almost forgot, if successful with the garment printer build, I am going to look into re-programming the EEPROM on the motherboard that monitors the cartridge ink levels. There is one bit in this PROM that disables the ink cartridge detector. Therefore, it won’t keep track of what cartridges are in the printer and how much ink is used. There is nothing more annoying than printing with the t-jet and seeing the ink lights start flashing after 3 shirts with 1440 white underbase. Wouldn’t be nice to disable it!

While on the subject of ink - this printer will be a CMYK printer only. My gameplan is to have CMYK printer and a white-only printed that are in calibrated together, so you print your white underbase on the first machine and then CMYK on the second machine.

In the next few days I will begin to post the design progress.

Feel free to leave any comments.

Mark

Cleaning the capping station on the t-jets has always been a key to proper operation. But if the bottom of the head is not clean the capping station will not seal with the head and the cleaning cycle will not be as effective. I will provide details soon on the cleaning of the head at:

www.directgarmentprinting.com/tutorials/clean-bottom-head

Mark

I find that even with a strong A/C, the humidity in the t-jet shop will increase from all the heating of water-based materials (i.e. pre-treatment and ink). Although it is nice to have the heatpress near the printer, I find that this adds to the localized humidity near the printer. I have since moved the heat presses away from the t-jets and monitor the humidity near each printer. You can get a temp/humidity sensor for $30 to $40 from many sources online.

Mark