30 Day Review Direct To Film Printer Epson L1800

We've had our direct-to-film printer for about 30 days. We've done about 100 prints and we're going to give a 30-day review for you right now. What is up? Welcome back. Do you like to do it, build it, or make it? So do we. And we have a new video each week. This week we're playing a little Siskel and Ebert. And we're doing a 30-day review on our Punahod Epson conversion kit here. Our L1800 with the ink stirrer, with the heater, and we're going to show you the whole printing process and what we've learned through each step. So what have we learned? Lesson number one, installation. Installation was pretty easy. There were a couple of little tricky pieces in there. The biggest, I think, was the virus software. We showed you how we fixed that in the first video that we did. Since then, installation has been great, software's been running great, and we're happy with it. Lesson number two, ink. Every printer needs ink. The great thing about this conversion kit, it comes with this special ink well here to hold these inks for the DTF printing. There's a stirrer in that white ink. That white ink is what, Garrett? Very finicky. So he says all of the time. Yes, it's finicky. And there's no beating around the bush. That ink does take maintenance. So there's a couple of things here with maintenance. You will have to run a print just about every day to keep that ink printing and moving. Because not only could ink settle in the ink well in these bottles on the side here, which is great for the stirrer, but it also settles in the ink cartridge. So as those tubes go to print through the print head, there's a little cartridge in there. And if that sets for more than a day, it will settle in that cartridge. So if it's set for more than a day or so, we will use the syringe that came with the printer. We'll pull the ink through the cartridge and then jump it back into the ink bottles and it's ready to go. You may have to do a print head cleaning on a regular basis. If your printer is clogged, streaky, yes, you will have to run a print head cleaning. That's done in the software. You can just say, what is it, file? Yeah, file, print head cleaning. And even with printing every day, you still have to do a nozzle flush at some point. So we had had our printer for just over three weeks or so and the white stopped printing altogether. We did a little research and found that you needed to do a print head nozzle flush. So we grabbed some Windex with ammonia. We're using a five to one ratio, five parts water, one part Windex. Pulled those cartridges out. We did a little spraying. We just squirt that down here on the little nozzle heads, print heads, cleared them, cleaned them out with a little paper towel and a little Q-tip, hit print and it was good to go. Back in action. Back in action. That's right. Lesson number three, the actual print. So we learned a couple of things here as well. We found that this printer will only add the white backing on PNGs. We have tried PDFs and we have tried JPGs, but we weren't able to get the white backing to print on those types of prints. So we bring in all of our print files, export them as PNGs and they print just fine. That white comes out beautifully. I don't know if you guys have tried anything different. If anyone knows anything different about how to print other formats, please let us know in the comments below. But that's how we've gotten it to work is using the PNGs. And the second lesson with printing is the print size. So this is an 11 by 17 printer, but as with most printers, it will not print 11 by 17. What we found is that it will do about 10.85 by 16. That last inch, if you try and print down to that 17th inch, it does get a little blurry. It fades out and the white ink won't print that far down on the page. So you'll have to keep your prints at about 10.85 by 16. Lesson learned number four, adhesive. So after that print, you're going to have to add that adhesive powder. So we use a little Tupperware container. We lay our print down in there, ink side up, pour the powder on it, and then just move it back and forth so that powder adheres to the back of the print. We did learn that if you didn't have enough white on the back of your print, that powder didn't stick as well. So you didn't have enough powder and it wouldn't stick to the t-shirt as well. So you want to make sure you've got that good white coating and you've got enough adhesive powder on there so that it will adhere to your t-shirt. Lesson number five, heating it up. Baking your DTF transfer in the oven. We found that the oven is great. We like the oven. It does heat up quickly. It does melt that adhesive in the center of the print. If you're doing a large format print and you're using that full 10.85 by 16, we have found that it's not really melting that adhesive in the four corners. It melts it right in the center, probably what, maybe six by eight maybe or something. I don't know. The center of the print seems to work really well. I can melt that powder, that adhesive powder, right in the center. But the four corners are still powdery when it comes out, even if you leave it in there for a long time, which we've tried, it still doesn't melt it. So what we have is a Wagner heat gun. This thing heats up to about 650 degrees. We just hold it over the corners and we can melt the adhesive with just a heat gun. I wouldn't recommend doing that for the full transfer sheet, but if you just need to melt those corners like we've had to do, this little heat gun will get the job done. Lesson number six, heat press. So you can take your transfer directly from your oven here, straight over to your heat press. You can see here we're using our heat press nation heat press. This is new to us. We love this thing. It has the auto open feature, the slide out drawer for your t-shirt. We'll press this thing at 300 degrees for 10 seconds. We take it off, we let it cool for about 20 to 30 seconds, and then we peel the transfer off and your t-shirt's ready to wear. And that's the full process and those are the lessons we've learned throughout the full printing process. So can I run a business with it? Well I wouldn't run a business around this setup, but I think this is a great tool to add to an existing business. It's going to be great for what we wanted to use it for. We're going to use it to print our Patreon t-shirts and maybe some t-shirt merchandise that we want to add into our store coming soon. We also want to use these DTF transfers we showed you before on some of our door rounds, add them to the MDF. So I think it's going to work great for that. It takes about 15 minutes to print it, add the adhesive, and bake it. So you can do about four prints in an hour, which is an eight-hour day, about 32 prints in a day. So it's not a fast process, but 32 prints is nothing to shake a stick at. So we're also offering a little bit of our print services to our neighbor next door. I know we've shared that he's a screen printer and Kelsey over next door, sometimes she wants to do some DTF printings for a small batch of a t-shirt order and we can do those for her. We can do 10 or 15, 20 prints and get those. And how much do these cost? The transfers are about a dollar each and we have about 25 cents in adhesive and ink. So each print, full-size print, is about $1.25 each. So for our purposes, I think it's great to add to our business. Would you do it again? I would do it again. There was a small learning curve with installing the software, a small order we did for Kelsey next door. How many shirts? We did 20 prints for her? No, six. Six. But we must have printed at least 50 transfers, working on getting that ink set up right, working on getting the white coming out correctly, working on getting the powder, working on melting the four corners. It was a huge lesson learned but the great thing about that is hopefully this video and some of the lessons that we've learned we've been able to share with you over this video series so that your learning curve is a lot shorter than ours and you'll probably use a lot less transfers than we did. A lot less expensive than ours. We've learned a lot over these 100 prints and I would definitely do it again. I think it's a really nice setup. It works for us. For us, yes. You know, maybe we'll outgrow it if we're going to start printing tons of t-shirts and that's our full-time business. You might need a bigger, larger, more commercial setup. Something with an automatic shake and bake. Yeah, you would. Yeah, you like that kind of that rolling it through. It'll automatically add the adhesive and roll it right through the heater. That's nice but I think that's probably... It's expensive. Yeah, 15 grand or something. It's very expensive. This setup was three grand, less under three grand. Yeah, so if you want to get into DTF printing, this is a great starter setup to start with. So how do they look after a few washes? We did a couple of test prints during our second video, our test print video, and we wanted to show you how they look after we've worn them for the past 30 days. So they've probably been washed four or five times and we have a couple of different views here. So for this one, this is the one we did that didn't have enough ink on the back. We didn't have quite as much white and we showed you that. But you can see here that the transfer is already splitting. This actually started splitting before we even washed it. It started doing this. So this is after four or five washes. It's not going to last very long but it's still here. Now this one with the proper amount of ink still looks great. It still looks exactly like it did after we pressed it. This has been through the wash cycle like I said four or five times and it's been through the dryer. I just put it in with the rest of the load of darks and it dried and washed beautifully. Yeah no no none of the edges are coming up or anything. It looks good. But we not only do we have these two things t-shirts to show you and some views of the DTF but we thought we'd show you how the DTF compares to maybe some of the other printing methods we've used over the years. We have a few of them. So these are our DTF prints. We compare this one to sublimation. So here's the DTF print. It looks beautiful. This ink and transfer is pretty stretchy. You can see it does stretch with the t-shirt. This is sublimation. This shirt has been washed I don't know a hundred times at least a hundred times. And you can see here that this transfer is going nowhere. The sublimation transfer truly binds with the ink binds with the materials in the t-shirt because it has that high polyester count. So while it looks a little bit faded over a hundred washes you can see it's certainly not going to peel off and nothing's going to happen to it. It's not going anywhere. The trick with this one is has to be done on a light or white colored materials. Another method we did a couple of years ago. Oh yeah. Was some screen printing. We used our Cricut to create a we added vinyl on top of a screen printing screen and actually did some screen printing. And that's this t-shirt. Now I know you see this exclamation over here but that happened when we did it. You can go back and see it in the video. We didn't have a good transfer but the rest of it still looks pretty good. It's like any screen printed t-shirt you've had over this has been washed at least a hundred times. At least a hundred. And over the course of those hundred washes the ink does start to fade a little bit and separate a little bit. But you know it's not going anywhere either. It's going to be there for a while. It'll probably last the lifetime of the t-shirt. As the t-shirt wears out you can see there's stains all over this one. The the ink will fade over time. And lastly last but not least this t-shirt was done four years ago. Yeah season one. This is actually uh this is glitter vinyl. And you can see here I did this t-shirt for Saint Patrick's day. This thing is worn out but I still wear it. I probably wear it once a week once every couple of weeks maybe. This has been washed two three hundred times. Yes this has been washed hundreds of times for sure and it looks great. I have been super impressed with how well this glitter vinyl has stuck to this shirt and stayed there. It's not really layered. You can see here that I cut the I cut the green out and then layered the white right inside and it looks great. Might be why it stuck better. Yeah because I didn't layer them. Yeah it looks great. So I just thought I would show you some of the t-shirts over the years and how they look compared to our DTF. Still I'm very happy with the DTF and I look forward to seeing what else we can do with it. Yeah me too. So what do you think? Are you still on the fence about getting a DTF printer? Do you guys have a DTF printer? What do you think? Did you hear any of our lessons learned? Do you have any others that you want to add? Because I think this is a great opportunity to share some of those lessons learned. When we were looking for videos we found only a few that were pretty in-depth and gave went into all of the details that we did. So add your lessons learned down below. Add them down below. Maybe we'll do an update using your lessons learned. Yeah I think that's a good one. We tried them out. Yeah big thanks to all of our patrons. Thank you so much. We love you guys. We just had a zoom call where we had 20 plus people on there. Yeah last night we had a great zoom call. They run over an hour now because there's a lot of exchange of information. A lot of chit-chatting. A lot of sharing and experiences. So it's a fun time. I think everyone enjoyed the conversation. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it every time. I love seeing everybody's shiny little faces and getting to put a face to the name. Yes yes we see your comments. We see you join the lives. We love for you to join us over on Patreon and join us on those zoom calls so we see you see you in person and able to chat with you in person. Well we are about out of time so if you're not going to join us for the patron after show we will see you next week where we'll do it build it and make it again. And on Tuesdays we do test cut Tuesdays. All Halloween coming up for the next month or so. We got a good one for this Tuesday. I've been waiting for this one for like a month.