If you are a custom t-shirt Printer who using using DTG equipment as one of your printing methods, you may run into DTG mistakes you would rather avoid.
DTG Printing is without a doubt one of the easiest ways to produce high-quality, ultra-custom apparel quickly. This isn’t a transfer system, meaning this machine actually prints directly onto your shirt (hence the name Direct-to-Garment).
But just like any piece of equipment or machinery, DTG mistakes can be made. That’s even in spite of the professional self-paced training and tech support team to back you up.
In the end, the thing our pros end up trouble-shooting most often… Is a simple user error.
To save you some time and a potential headache, we are going to go through the four most common DTG mistakes that you can make when DTG printing and how to avoid them.
#1 | Pretreatment Issues
For those of you reading, who are new to DTG printing and aren’t sure what pretreatment is, note that it’s a critical part of how the DTG printing process works.
Pretreatment is what makes the ink stick to the shirt. It’s sprayed on top of the fabric you are printing on before you print.
There are several different ways that people pretreat their shirts before printing:
- Wagner hand sprayer (made for painting)
- Generic Household Spray bottles
- Homemade plastic container boxes
Any expert DTG printer will tell you – “DO NOT DO THESE”. It’s very attractive to save money upfront by using the least expensive way to deliver pretreat to a garment, but you’ll often pay for it in errors.
These methods just don’t work well and constantly lead to DTG printing mistakes. Here is the problem:
- Inconsistency – Each shirt is being pretreated differently (few people can control the sprayers to apply an even coat, especially after the 10th, 20th or 50th shirt!
- Uneven Spread – Areas of the shirt will have too much pretreat and others will have not enough
- No control – No control on the amount or volume of pretreatment being sprayed
To solve this problem, we use the PTM – Perfect Pretreatment Machine.