Greg Farmer, INSTA Graphics System Sales Team:
Hey, I am Greg with the Insta Graphic Systems Sales Team, and today I’m going to show you three different ways you can dress a shirt on the platen of our 728. So this is our automatic machine, it’s air powered. It’s a 15 by 20 platen, so kind of a standard t-shirt size, but there are a few different ways that you can dress a shirt on this to perform a press. And I’m just going to go through those with you right now. This is a swing away machine, so you can swing the heated platen completely away, gives you full access to the lower platen here. I don’t have a Teflon cover on today. It’s kind of up to you if you like Teflon covers. That can allow for quicker dressing sometimes because it makes it a little bit more slippery and the shirt slides on better, but you certainly do not have to use one. Really depends on your application.
The first method I’m going to show you is dressing the shirt horizontally. So you pull it around the platen just like that and line it up. And we’re going to place our transfer here. And a rule of thumb I was taught is about four fingers down from the top, but everyone kind of has their own style of doing a shirt front. This is our Ultima Hot Peel film transfer. So we’re doing nine seconds at 335 degrees and this is a cotton poly blend 50/50 and it’s a hot peel. I’m going to peel that off. Pull the shirt right off the platen and there you go. The second method I’m going to show you… This is only a large size shirt, but it’ll still work. This is ideal if you’re using double XL, triple XL. Shirts like that. You actually dress it the same way, but just the opposite way on the platen. Sometimes those larger shirts, it’s better to have the platen go horizontally across the shirt like that.
And as you can see, when you dress it this way, you get the neck right there and the sleeves right there, and sometimes it’s a little bit easier to eyeball where your transfer is going to go that way. So I’m going to do four fingers again. I’m going to center this up and go ahead and perform the press. Again, we have a hot peel, so I’m going to peel immediately and there you go. Comes out great again, doing it that way, Again, that’s perfect for really large shirts, large hoodies, things like that to dress it that way. And then the final way, which is actually my favorite way because I’m lazy, is just to lay the shirt right on top of the platen. And some people think you always have to dress your shirt fully around the platen. That’s not really the case.
It kind of depends on your application and you definitely want to test and make sure, but if you’re trying to go for speed, sometimes just putting the shirt right on top, getting your transfer lined up, get my four fingers in there, sometimes this is actually the quickest way to do it and works great. Again, you want to test to make sure… If you have a shirt with really thick seams or with buttons or something like that, sometimes you do have to dress it. But for our application, this works great. Thanks again for joining us today. And remember when performance matters, Insta has your total solution.