100% Red Polyester Shirt Printing with Image Armor Ink

PRINTING 100% POLYESTER WITH IMAGE ARMOR ULTRA

We've been hearing a lot lately about this pretreatment, this ink, etc. that will allow us to print on polyester fabrics. For the last 4 years Image Armor pretreatments have allowed this to be accomplished. Fortunately with over the past several years we've had additional advancements with inks that also helps make printing on 100% polyester fabrics easier.

Yes, Virginia, That's Red 100% Polyester
We are working on a series of posts / information to help people be able to print on 100% polyester easier with the Image Armor ULTRA pretreatment. The beauty of this is that there is NO NEED for additional pretreatments to accomplish this process. Image Armor has been able to accomplish a cross platform of fabric from 100% Cotton to 100% polyester printing with A SINGLE PRETREATMENT. Even on RED polyester - which everyone knows is the worst possible candidate for DTG printing and white ink.

So, What Did We Do?
First, we utilized the Gildan 64000 100% polyester shirts. These shirts work well for certain DTG printing as other brands also may work. You'll have to do your OWN testing and experimentation as with ANY procedure to find what works best in your shop. We are only providing this information as a gateway - a starting point - for you to begin your polyester pretreating endeavors.

We pretreated with Image Armor ULTRA Ready To Use pretreatment.
We printed with the Gildan 64000 100% polyester shirt.
We pretreated the shirt with the Viper MAXX pretreatment machine (a setting of 60 for Fluid Application on the MAXX)
We applied approximately 30 grams of pretreatment to the shirt (for a 14" x 14" area)
We heat pressed using a Stahl's Hotronix Air Fusion. First we hover cured for 1 minute about 1/4" off the shirt @ 265F. Then Heat pressed at 20psi for 20 seconds, let steam out, then repressed again for 20 seconds.

PRINTED THE SHIRT:

We printed on the Epson F2000
We printed using Image Armor F-SERIES inks (though you can also use OEM inks)
We set the driver settings to
Print Quality for White - Level 2
Print Quality for CMYK - Level 3
Bumped the white laydown up to 55% (additional white ink printed)
Set it to a level 5

Curing the Shirt
Hover the heat press over the wet ink for 1 minute with a distance of 1/4" off the shirt.
Heat pressed the shirt on the lowest pressure using a Stahl's Hotronix at 265F. We pressed 3 cycles of 30 seconds each.
Washing the shirt was done on medium temperature water with detergent, but for drying it was only tumble dried - NEVER HOT AIR DRY THE SHIRTS. This will prematurely break down the ink film.

SEVEN WASHES IN AND STILL COUNTING
You can see in our photo to the right here that we are 7 washes into the process and the image still looks great and virtually no breakdown on the ink film. There was a significant amount of "boxing" from the pretreatment on the shirt prior to washing. This did washout after the first wash or two. We know that many people will balk at this because you can't give a customer a shirt with the pretreatment box on it. We understand. However, this is the option at the moment for printing on RED polyester. On a black shirt you will not see the box as visibly or at all. We wanted to show the WORST case scenario here with a RED polyester shirt.

The closeup picture (at the top of the page) show the actual printed quality much better. Not only did we not get any real dye migration the print still looks great. We are continually working on doing additional testing but you'll be able to see that the print still looks good. Additional heat press cycles of 4 or 5 cycles might be more advantageous than just pressing the three times that we did here. This will allow the ink to "set" a little better and most likely give a longer product life cycle.

CONCLUSION
Printing on 100% polyester has been able to be done for years now, but there is still no magic bullet that gets rid of all the current issues associated with polyester printing (dye migration, pretreatment boxing, etc). However, it is possible to successfully complete the process as we've shown here in our example.

A little care in pretreating and printing with additional in house testing by DTG shops that want to print polyester will find that this information will be a good starting point.

It's not just the inks or pretreatments that make 100% polyester printing a possibility. It is actually a combination of many factors that go beyond ink and pretreatment - the process. So, if anyone tells you polyester printing can only be done with their printer, with only their inks sets, only their pretreatments.... they are lying to you for one reason or another. If anyone tells you they are the only ones that will let you DTG 100% polyester they're giving you a line of BS.

We wanted to show it is possible and has been for several years utilizing the Image Armor pretreatments. Can you do it with other pretreatments? Maybe. But we can do 100% cotton or 100% polyester with a single pretreatment.