Vacuum Pallets Can Expand Product Offerings

March 16, 2009

Vacuum pallets enable manual press owners to produce a wide range of products.

By Mark Clewell, sales manager, Vastex Intl. Inc.

Q: I want to offer more products and services to my customer without buying an expensive new machine. I have heard a vacuum pallet would allow me to use my manual press to do a wider range of products. Can you explain how this works?

A: A vacuum pallet can turn your manual press into a sign and transfer printer. It’s a special pallet with a pattern of small holes on the surface. Underneath, it’s attached to a wet/dry shop vacuum. Turn on the vacuum and it sucks air down through the holes. When you put material like transfer paper or foam board on the pallet, the vacuum effect holds it securely in place.

With this inexpensive attachment you can print small signs like those used for yard sales, political candidates or real estate. You also can print plastisol transfers that can be heat applied to various garments – and they can be all cotton, all polyester or cotton/poly blends.

The vacuum pallet also works great for signs because, in most cases, you will want to print both sides. If you use spray adhesive to hold signage on a regular pallet, it will gum it up. A vacuum pallet doesn’t use adhesive so you can safely print both sides of a sign. Of course, you must let the first side dry before putting it back on press to print the other side. And remember that to print signs, you need to use a special ink that air dries.

Vacuum pallets also work great for printing plastisol transfers. You can’t use the same ink you normally use to screen print T-shirts, so ask your ink company to recommend a plastisol transfer ink. Transfer inks can be divided into two categories: hot-split and cold-peel.

Hot-split refers to the fact that the transfer should be peeled from the carrier paper while still warm after coming off the heat press. Some of the ink adheres to the shirt and some stays on the carrier sheet, which produces a very soft hand on the printed garment.

A cold-peel transfer, on the other hand, must cool completely before you peel the carrier paper, and this transfers all the ink to the shirt. Cold-peel produces a heavier hand on the finished garment, which is often preferred by teams and the athletic market.

Printing multi-color transfers requires extra steps. Print one color and gel it in the dryer before printing the second color. Now gel that in the dryer before printing the third ink, and so forth. You can use a flash cure unit instead of a conveyor dryer, but you need to be attentive. You do not want to fully cure the ink on the paper because a complete cure should happen only in the heat press when the transfer bonds with the fibers in the garment. 

Sign printing inks, transfer paper and transfer inks can be purchased from any screen printing supply distributor.

Finally, you also can print bumper stickers on a vacuum pallet. Buy precut blanks and put them on the pallet just like a sign. They are vinyl and must be printed with a special ink that is a little tricky to work. It also has very strong smell so you will want to use proper ventilation if you decide to print on vinyl.

Mark Clewell is sales manager for Vastex, a manufacturer of manual screen printing equipment and accessories. It specializes in start-up packages. For more information, go to vastex.com or call 1-800-4VASTEX.

Off the Cuff: Selling to Religious Organizations: Part 1 of 2
In our industry we decorate a massive assortment of items by a broad variety of technologies. Then we distribute what we produce to virtually every economic sector in every nook and cranny of society.
September 14, 2009

How to Apply Foil
Editor’s note: In the following pages, the authors take you step-by-step through the process of adding foil to your T-shirt artwork. First, they detail how to incorporate foil into the workflow of an automatic press. The process differs significantly for printers using a manual press, so the authors also detail how to apply foil when printing with a manual screen printing press.
September 04, 2009

Foil Adds Sparkle and Margin 
While getting started printing with foil will be a trial-and-error process, here are some tips to reduce the learning curve. 
When we get an order at our shop, it’s not uncommon to hear an employee exclaim, “Foiled again!” That’s because as many as 15% of our orders involve some kind of foil printing, making the process somewhat of a specialty for our shop — Forward Printing, Oakland, Calif.
September 03, 2009

Diversifying Your Customer Base  
Learn to evaluate and adjust your mix of clientele for optimum profitability and stability.
While the economic lows that many American markets have been experiencing for the past year are certainly painful, they’re also nothing new. Historically, the tide of business success continually ebbs and flows, with one market experiencing a rush of good fortune while another watches its revenue all but dry up. This cyclical nature of business is precisely why decorators must have a diverse customer base that allows them to weather slowdowns — or even meltdowns — in parts of the economy.
September 02, 2009