Epson Stylus Pro 9600 printing on polycotton

[guymark]

Well, while having a go at making my own spooling roller with tensioning arm for trying to print non-paper backed material, I ended up winning a proper bit of kit for (I think) about £49 + carriage. Still going to finish my home brew effort BUT I wanted to have a play with the bit of kit I won too.

So although not *quite* what I wanted for tensioning, this evening I had another go at printing polycotton sheet.

It wasn't amazing - but it wasn't awful either.

The takeup roller managed to keep the tension about right with some tweaking (variable clutch, adjusted by screwing a knob to tension an internal spring) - and, if the polycotton had been supplied on a roller to keep things nicely aligned, I think the middle 36 inches or so of a 44" print would have been almost spot on.

I should have taken a photo of it but I have already cut it into bits so I can chuck half of various test prints in with washing to see how the Inktec Ink holds up to 30c washing, 40c washing and 60c washing. I am not expecting the world, but if it can handle 20+ washes at 30c without too much fade, I think it will be suitable for printing custom jacket linings and "occasional use shirts / blouses" for creative friends. Some has already survived being hand washed at around 35c for around 40 minutes. ZERO detectable fade - though I would have been disappointed otherwise.

Now I now it sort of works, I am going to get a sensible amount of material on a roll - and then print my "test prints" with a selection of settings to try and work out the best ink density etc for polycotton and also pure cotton.

Probably never really going to make much use of this - but I find it fun making something perform a task that it was never meant to do. My only concern was the possibility of a head crash but the worst I had was a set of TINY wrinkles - didn't even spoil the printout - so although I watched it like a hawk, once the take up roller had a good grab, the tension was spot on and away it went.

I set the printer to "canvas", 1440dpi with fast mode "off" on the basis it might squirt in a bit of extra ink - but the colours were a BIT light. This may of course be partly to do with the fact that I was printing on polycotton - so only the cotton fibres would really take up the ink - that said, the cloth was dry to the touch by the time it came out of the printer.

This might be useless information really - but I guessed I might not be the only person who was wondering about whether a printer designed for paper could make a reasonable go at printing on regular thin material.

When I get the roll and get some decent sized prints, I will photo them and upload them if anyone is interested in the quality of the print.

 

[The Hat]

When I get the roll and get some decent sized prints, I will photo them and upload them if anyone is interested in the quality of the print.

O’ yes please do, I love when someone comes up with a good idea that works...

 

[jddriver]

Gotta luv the comment "I find it fun making something perform a task it was never meant to do" My hubby tells me that all the time. "Why oh why do you want to re-engineer this thing" he says. My reply is always, "cos I enjoy having a go".

I wonder if there is any sort of spray coating you could use on the back of the material to help stiffen it a tad, maybe spray on starch? Stuff that would just wash out, but help keep the weave of the fabric together as it goes through the printer. One issue could be that the ink adheres to the starch and gets washed away, but that may depend on the thickness or otherwise of the fabric. Just thoughts.

 

[piers]

Hi folks, fantastic to find this thread. I recently bought a 9600 for precisely this purpose. Picked it up from Ebay for 99 quid and am made up. I have been using sheets and duvets from charity shops to print on as I am less worried about smudges when it is only 30p per metre !
Here are my observations.

Head cleaning. The trick with Halfords windscreen spray workds a treat (see internet, mostly it is windex but halfords equivalent did the trick unblocking the heads).

The replacement inks on Ebay at 47 quid worked mostly without a problem
I had an issue in that my replacement black was matte not photo. I discovered the method to change over easily
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/swapping-the-black-ink-on-the-epson-7600-and-9600/
but when I came to print i got a very alarming 'command error' when printing. It turned out that I needed to go into the printer preferences before printing and change the settings to matte there too.

My first print was pretty washed out (though still allowed me much amusement with my mates when I made a shirt carrying a particular slogan) and I found the recipe for a home made bullble set here
https://www.theidearoom.net/guest-post-infarrantly-creative/

It made a huge difference to the colour, much more vibrant ! The fabric becomes a bit 'soapy' and does take a bit of washing out before wearing (i rinsed by hand but had to put it in washing machine at 30 degrees on a quick wash to get it wearable) but the colours don't appear to bleed very much if at all.

I don't have the engineering skills that OP has so my home made effort was pretty poor. Took the inner tube from a carpet as my take up reel and used expanding foam to fll the ends. then stuck some cut up broom stick in to act as spindles. Built a frame using buckshee wood and some 4 inch nails to act as cradle for the spindle. and though it is not motorised in any way I can gaffer tape the fabric to some fabric which is already attached to the reel (saves me wasting a couple of feet every print run) and then put a weight (in my case some lengths of wood) in the hammock formed to give some tension on the fabric coming out of the printer.

This itself was not enough. Having wasted quite a bit of fabric I realised a number of things.
1) the slower the print, the less the bunching/smudging/ rucking of the fabric. The printer utility gave a choice of matte paper etc and when I switched to canvas it went from 360 dots per inch to 720. This effectively makes it 4 times slower but much more controlled as it goes through the machine.
2) the danger point is as the printer reverses the fabric through the machine. I don't know why it does this before starting the print, but seems to be when the rucks start. I find holding my hand on the fabric reel and keeping a lot of back torsion on it means that the whole print job works nicely. If you don't it gets rucked up an disaster ensues. Ideally I would find some way to have a ratchet device that keeps a constant(ish) tension as the machine feeds the fabric but takes up any slack when it rolls it backwards. I will leave it to the engineers.
Finally I attach a picture of my latest effor so you can see what I am talking about.

 

[guymark]

Awesome result Piers!

My endeavours have been less encouraging - I can get the printer to print the material well for the most part (though you are spot on about the frustrating "up down shuffle" it likes to do before printing) but it seems to be dripping ink on the material for some reason, mostly at one edge or the other. It doesn't seem to be catching at all but clearly something is not quite right.

Helpful to know that you have found that the canvas setting is best, I had made the printer go even slower (1440 dpi) but I am going to give it another go with the printer set to canvas.

You certainly seem to have good clean prints coming out - very well done!

The alum mix looks interesting - and I wish I could find "freezer paper" in the UK as that would give other options.

jddriver cam up with a very good idea -of using a spray starch to help stiffen the material up.

I am interested to know what inks you have chosen. I went for the Inktec "PEP" range, not the cheapest but without wishing to tempt fate, they appear to be working very well on paper, coated polyester (banners etc) and now polycotton. Cotton I think will give a much more vibrant colour (especially with your alum idea), but I bought polycotton for testing as I found some 44" wide AND about £1.50 per linear metre - so it is not too expensive to play around.

I must carry on experimenting with cloth printing, has been a busy few weeks of late but should have some spare "printer playing" time. Incidentally, if you get fabric on a roll, they usually have much smaller cores - but if you pop online and order 32mm tube (suggest 2mm thick), then you can make a new printer spindle so you just lift out the one with paper fitted and drop in the material one. I am going to try to "bore out" a couple of old CDs with a cone drill (cheap and really useful accessory for a drill) and slide them on to hold the cloth in place - and secure with just a couple of jubile clips. A bit crude but will do well enough for testing.

Good idea on using the charity shop sheets for test material, I hadn't thought of that - oh, and cracking deal of £99 for the printer - that's an amazing deal, well done!

 

[Andreas S]

Hello, what a nice thread. As I have some expirience in garment printing due to my work in r&d some observations.
A) To avoid wrinkles the garment have to be primed first. Priming will achieve cleanig but also makes sure that the ink won't go to far into the garment and prevents bleeding. Priming depends on 1) type of garment, 2) type of ink. There are special formulas for each combination and there is NO universal primer. Then the garment must be dryed.
B) To print on sole garment you will need tension rolls, some of them pending. That means either a very good knowledge about mechanics or a lot of try and error, but still achiveable. As you just want to print short runs you also can try to feed the printer with two rolls. Garment on one, strong CAD paper on the other. Best would be if the paper roll is slightly wider but the rolls have to be perfectly aligned. Tape the first 10mm of the garment to the paperand then feed it in in the printer. The paper roll have to be motorized and the garment roll running free. Normaly that should work out quite fine, we do so for test runs.
C) Inkjet garment printing is much more sophisticated and difficult then photo printing. Normaly you have to use a different ink for each kind of garment to achieve best resultats and if you don't want to be sued by the lawyer untill the rest of your live. Ink for cotton isn't the same stuff as ink for polyesther, ink for polyesther is different to ink for polyamide and so on. Forget to make high quality prints on mixed weaving as polycotton or polyamide-polyesther. The ink will stay only on one of them, never on both. That means that the image will be either on the warp or the weft. Even in dyeing machines they need 2 baths of different dyes to do the job.
D) Fastness depends on the ink. Best results are achieved with reactive inks, some of them should be suitable with epson standard plotters as the 9600. Others needs thermo printheads. Some are good for cotton only, others for polyesther, non of them for polyamide. In any way you will need a heating unit to reveal the ink and fix it. Either infrared or simple heaat. for a small print you can even try your oven in the kitchen. 190 °C / 10 minutes should be ok, but maybe you will have to look for another spoose/girlfriend . Don't use cheap chinese ink (neither pigment, dye, sublimation nor reactive). In Europe, and I suppose in the USA too, you must be able to provide a certification of the ink to proove the chemical composition and that the ink was tested and approuved by different health organisations. This certification has to be renewed every year. If the printed garment have to be used for kids it will be very hard to obtain a spécial certification because you have to send in the printed garment before the real production.
E) Rincing IS NOT the same as hand or machine washed laundry. It should be done imediately after revealing and fixing the ink. There are 3 baths to be used, 2 of them have different chemistry in them at different temperature and the third is clear cold water. The exact composition have to be balanced to the ink you are using if you want to achieve the best possible fastness. If there is some interest I can provide the basical composition and temp of each bath.

For testing washing fastness we are using OMO wahing powder. OMO is the standard for testing in the textile industry, not because it smells so fine or it'the best but they have the hugest amount of bleaching agents. As they claimed in their old adds "OMO whashes whiter"
Wash + thumbling 3 times at least.
Also make some rubbing tests before you launches your production to assure that the ink is really fixed.
IMHO it is possible to achieve a quite good result but it will need some try and error to find the perfect mixes. Priming could be done in a bathtube or something else. Drying, hmm? But there are some pre primed garment rolls on the market if you don't want to mess around. Printing itself is easy and to reveal and fix the ink IR lamps will be a good solution. If you want to use an oven keep in mind that you just have 5-10 minutes before the reaction have to start … The rincing can be done in bassins and that's all.
Some imprtant informations I forgot :
Melting point of Polyamides is much lower then Polyesters, so don't try this with any kind of Polyamide , never !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ignition of cotton (woven garment) 267 °C
Point of fusion Polyesters 220 - 260 °C

 

[piers]

Hi Guy/Andreas
I am only going to print stuff in pursuit of my hobby of making wacky clothes I have a day job so I am not contemplating going into commercial production. However the information you provide is very interesting. I think I will stick to 100% cotton to make sure that the image takes equally on the weft and warp. I already go through all the charity shop sheets/duvet covers looking for those little tags which give the consituency ! Guy I got lots of smudges at first, and I think it came down to lack of preparation, I now make sure I iron the fabric well before putting onto the spool and that seems to help. I looked at freezer paper but it is way too expensive for a decent amount of fabric. I tried ordinary laundry starch (you can get it in waitrose) but though it stiffened the fabric nicely the first 'strike' completely blocked the nozzles, cue much head cleaning, so I abandoned that idea.
Andreas, I tried putting the fabric through on top of paper. I used ordinary homebase lining paper gaffer taped to the leading edge of the fabric and gaffer taped down the middle of two strips to make it wide enough, however that buckled as it fed through and ruined the results. Not sure where to get my hands on some 44" wide paper roll (well cheapskately that is ;-) )
Piers

 

[Andreas S]

Hi Piers,
My objection are for general purpose to give some hints to everyone either for hobby or to those who are thinking about of do some commercial production.
Some inks used for garment printing
http://www.dupont.com/products-and-...-inks/articles/artistri-product-selector.html
For the paper go to some blueprinter. Often they have rolls left with just a few meters and they are useless in production as they can't be sure to go at the end of a job with them.
If there is a weaving company close to you it will be possible to make a bargain there too. At the end of production they are coditioning the garments on rolls of standard lenght. Sometimes they are just missing 1-2 m to complete a roll and the garment will be thrown away. Cotton can be recycled but they don't got a lot of money for that, so anyone can always try do ask them for a few meters.
Andreas

 

[piers]

Hi Andreas, thanks the tip on roll ends for printers and weavers, very interesting indeed. I think perhaps I have seen just that sort of thing being sold on Ebay ! I shall search for local weavers.
Ta
Piers

 

[Andreas S]

You are welcome, Piers. For the paper, I know this from my brother who runs a blueprinting business (but also another one dedicated to fine art and latex printing).