UV Printing 101: Why We Got a UV Printer & What You Need to Know!

what is up welcome back do you like to do it build or make it so do we and we have new videos each week we've been sharing more content using our UV printers and we've been getting some questions about UV printing in general so this week we thought we would do a little video on the who what when and why we got a UV printer what is UV printing UV printing or ultraviolet printing uses special UV curable inks that are applied to the material as the ink is deposited in ultraviolet light follows closely behind instantly curing the ink with this rapid curing you don't get the bleeding or spreading of the ink so you get a crisp vibrant image every time so ladies think about your gel manicures as your polish is applied you put your hands under the UV lights in the little lamp it instantly dries your nails you can walk out with a Perfect manicure that's what happens with these prints so what makes UV printing so great I love it because it's so versatile it can print on practically any hard surface it can print on paper plastic glass metal wood and even some Fabrics we already talked about how the inks are cured instantly so it's speed and efficiency meaning that once your project comes off you're done it's ready to go so turnaround time is faster and it's making your production more efficient I also love the durability UV printing provides scratch resistant pretty durable surface this board has been out there for about 11 months and these are UV DTF transfers that we applied to this board they still look great so they're UV resistant the colors look pretty much like they did on day one and they're still pretty durable I mean I I still can't scratch them and this is untreated MDF so this is not painted there is no protection on this board so that shows you what MDF will do outside just raw but these stickers are straight on this raw surface and they B snow no sanding nothing the rain well right this it rained all day yesterday this board is actually wet well it's rained all year it's been out in the weather for a complete year and they still look great and another factor is the voc's or volatile organic compounds it has low voc's which makes it a great product and a great machine for us to use indoors we don't need any special filtration system for it we can just print using our one0 Outlet it's not using a 220 volt Outlet it's a prettyy big machine and the roll to roll is also a pretty small machine but both use 110 and I can use them indoors with no special equipment so you might be asking why did we get a UV printer well we wanted to be able to offer more products we want to expand our product offering for B2B we want to be able to offer better pans more options on tumblers we want to be able to offer like I don't know golf balls seem to be a big thing keychains we can even do skateboards we could offer like anything hard surface we can now print on and actually make them pop right what else do we have there phone cases lone cases USB drives yeah luggage tags baseballs skateboards Awards we just went to the APA there are so many shaped Awards out there there's thousands of different shapes well awards that you can laser engrave but maybe add some UV printing to you can use acrylic Awards there were so many different options we could purchase a w blanks and then print on them I really want to expand that B2B side of our business signage and displays if you've been following along with our social media you'll see that I've been doing some window clings for our front of our Workshop space this allows me to be able to change it out for the seasons we painted them with paint a few years ago but that was hard to switch out on a frequent basis now I can switch them with each season and I'm so excited to add that versatility and changing Decor to the front of this Workshop space I can also offer for signage for inside the workshop space things like Hey bow toown this way and or simple directions just uh get your paint over here get your rollers over here yes yes mhm and we can also offer these types of signage items for other businesses some more B2B signage products packaging we can also do some custom packaging now we can include stickers transfers again if I want to throw in a little pen I throw a sticker on there just packaging in general I can take up to a whole other level fun inserts if I want to do a whole bunch of postcards I wouldn't have to order those from canva maybe that maybe if I were doing hundreds of them that would be more efficient but if I've wanted to do some fun giveaway type things I could print those myself and that would be exciting I'm looking forward to doing something like that I can't wait to start throwing some stickers up in the boxes oh decorative pieces so we also of course and this was like the main reason this is the main reason we got it I wanted to be able to add p P backers to our sign so if you've seen a couple of our test cut Tuesdays maybe followed along with our Sunday Studio sessions you'll see that we've been trying to offer some pattern backer pieces for some of our signs here I have a couple this is just a half of a butterfly well that one behind us butterfly sign that we did and this is using roll to roll but I can also print these we also did some patterned acrylic and I want to be able to offer some P pattern acrylic that goes with some of our kits we did uh the bunny glass cles for our happy Easter sign and we printed this acrylic it was clear we printed it we cut these out and if you order the happy Easter unfinished bunny kit we throw in a couple of pieces acrylic for the glasses if you're thinking about investing in a UV printer we can share some of our requirements that we came up with when we were thinking about getting a UV printer so our first was what is our primary application you can't do it that way you got to do number one number one how are you going to use this thing we already knew how we wanted to use it we wanted to be able to print on some raw MDF to create some backers we also wanted to create some our personalized acrylic MH we knew we wanted to expand on some of our B2B offerings make some tumblers a lot faster number two flatbed versus roll to roll we spent months negotiating whether we wanted a flatbed versus roll to roll we went through both of us advantages disadvantages I really wanted the roll the roll because CU I thought it was going to be the most versatile thing that we could buy I thought once we printed that transfer it's just like a giant sticker I could slap it on anything I could slap it on a tumbler I could throw it on a skateboard we could put it on the pens the USB drives the the the golf balls people love the golf balls I don't know we could even throw it on the raw MDF to make our own backers we could even put it on some acrylic I mean it won't look like it's printed on acrylic but it'll be there I wanted the flatbed because I felt like you could do all of that and then some so with the flatbed you'll actually print directly to your material or your substraight so I would print directly to the MDF and I wouldn't have to put a sticker on here print directly to the acrylic or anything else I could print directly to the pens to the tumblers all of those things you can also use adhesive transfer sheets you lay that on your printer peel the backing off you can print on that and you can can create your own transfers with the flatbed it's just like doing it with the roll to roll except you're adding an extra step where you have to put the B film on top of it the other big consideration with roll to roll versus flatbed is there is a pricing difference the flatbed is going to cost you more there's a a larger initial upfront investment versus the roll to roll was probably half the price of the flatbed which is why Garrett loves to do the old let's do the least amount of money for the most amount of bang to get started I'm all about trying to get in and test the waters for the least amount of money yes yes he is number three print quality now we know we didn't need like photo quality because we wanted to do backers and stuff but then we also do some military signs and those military signs get super detailed where we take those insia patches and we make them an actual sign or something some of those have a thous thousands of colors and stuff in them and they get crazy it's not something that we could hand paint so the printer needed to be able to pull off those patches so we really had to think about what those print heads were that we wanted to invest in the higher quality the print head the more expense you're adding to your purchase so that when we chose well we didn't say we chose to go flatbed to begin with why because that's what I wanted you know how it is so we I felt like flatbed gave us the best of Both Worlds so we did choose to add the larger investment because we got both options with the flatbed and we chose to go with the higher quality print heads so that we could have the option to do photo quality in the future if we wanted to I figured if we're going to go with this investment go big or go home right go big or go home and with that higher investment we did get better color management so we were able to do color matching for both our paint brand and these military signs some of those mil AR signs are very hard to do the color matching on again they have like a thousand colors in them so the color matching was pretty important too and the print heads are are what allow you to be able to do that number four consider the print size and the Machine size as we talked about flatbed versus roll to roll our flatbed printer is quite large what is it it takes up about a 6x6 ft area right it is pretty large the roll to- roll machine is much smaller probably a 2X twoot area maybe a third of that size yeah yeah exactly was that a quarter of the size a third yep so and it it really doesn't take up a full room where the UV flatbed printer really does take up a good it's going to take up a full room in your house we did go with the larger printer the flatbed only because we wanted to be able to do printing Cuts so we want to be able to print a 2tx 3ft board right our flat flat bed is 24x 36 you can get them smaller what is it like 18 by 24 there's just different smaller bed sizes if you know you're going to be doing small items like just a set of golf balls or maybe a few phone cases smaller promotional items maybe you only need a smaller bed size but again we want to be able to do rounds and backers yes I knew I wanted at least a 16in backer or maybe even an 18 18 in but for some of these military signs I really wanted to be able to go up to a 24in backer and the 24x 36 in bed will allow me to do that now with the roll to roll we did end up getting the 13in wide so it'll do 13in wide by I don't know I think it's like 4T now you can go up to a 24in wide but that really added to the cost and I didn't want to make that kind of investment to test the waters number five cost of ownership how much is this thing actually going to cost me to run on The Daily so we talked about the different Investments with the print heads the bed size but they're also things like uh the inks that you'll be adding it's a cmk so each color is its own bottle of inkish cmk varnish and electricity maintenance how much time is it going to take me to maintenance this machine do I have to maintenance it every single day and how much does that take how long will the maintenance every day be mhm for our our machine we know there are some there's different brands out there different models for our machine I really don't have to maintenance it every day well that was one of the things that we look for when we were looking for a machine we wanted to make sure it had that white ink circulation we want to make sure that it had head capping because we wanted to take a lot of that maintenance out of the equation so we were looking for a machine that used a lot less maintenance and had a lot of that maintenance already automated now that's not to say that there is no maintenance we do have to make sure that we run this every few days so but that's not a problem because I'm always looking for the next fun thing to print and I'm always preparing in the days in between or in the evenings or something I'm always creating some new design and right now it's still new and exciting so I do my window clings oh I want to make something for the tumbler or I yeah because this one did come with a tumbler attachment which I haven't used yet but I'm excited to do that I'm making posters I'm making signage there are so many different things that you can do there's always a reason to run it and you have to do that every few days just to make sure that the inks are flowing through and nothing settles or dries in the flow process there the tubes yeah so maintenance was number six so we just covered we covered that one oh sorry I jumped the gun that's all right you want to do number seven then yes number seven software compatibility something to think about and we see a lot on the Forum and people have asked us as well hey do you have to learn new software yes you do so there's a couple of different things with the flatbed we do have to use Adobe Photoshop now I haven't had experience with Adobe Photoshop Garrett has so it was no big deal for him but it was a consideration for me I was a little bit nervous but really there's not a whole lot to it and it was quick for me to pick up and do what I needed to do for the UV printer so with that well there are a few types of rips off Ware so the the rip software that we use for our flatbed is very industrial it doesn't really do any hand holding at all so we did need to use like Photoshop to prep the images get it ready turn it into a tiff put the white underneath put the varnish on top then we can send it to the machine now the other machine the roll to roll that we have does all of that for you it does a lot of hand holding all you really need to do is load your image tell it what size and hit print so we didn't exact sorry but but there are gives and takes on that so with that I'm not able to really utilize the varnish and the white like I want to or can yes Build It Up create textures or if I make my own Tiff using the industrial software in Photoshop I can layer it I can have varnish and spot areas I can really make it look different glossy and flatten areas I can do raay things like what they call 2.5d Print in yes you can do that with the flat bed but you can't really do that with the roll to roll you're really going to add the white the ink and the varnish and you can choose whether to add varnish or not add varnish those are really your options but it's so simple just to load the image in and say go and I don't think we explained what rip is uh it really just converts the image and allows you to take the image and the Machine to understand that there is a white layer an ink layer and then a varnish layer which is that varnish layer is that shiny um glossy layer on top really adds some protectant to it yeah so you could choose whether to add the varnish or not add the varnish like I said but you are going to learn a new piece of software so Garrett and I both came from an application development background so we've both been in it new software really isn't that intimidating to either of us so we knew we could pick it up rather quickly but if you're new and you're to UV Printing and you don't really have uh a technical background maybe roll to roll is where you go because like I said you load the image you click print it's going to do all of that for you number eight environmental and safety concerns because we had to run this thing inside we wanted to make sure there was no like poisonous fumes that got emitted when we were doing our printing yes I was worried about that like if you would if you were to use solvent printing you're definitely going to need some kind of extra filtration something to clean the air but because this is low vocc and instantly cured and there's not a lot of smell to it I can smell the inks I can smell it when it's running but it's not strong it's not overpowering and it's not dangerous so low voc's are great with these UV printers both of them we did want to have a lid on our flat bid printer because that ultraviolet light can damage your eyes so don't watch your print print Kim Kim loves The Watcher print I mean I just don't look at the blue light that's all so I really wanted to have a cover on the flatbed for safety for dust just to make sure nothing would mess with the print and the print wouldn't mess with my eyes right nothing falls on it it's really protected while it's running it's in that little covered case as it's running true oh investigate your manufacturer reputation this is a great one so I alluded to this a moment ago there are a lot of different UV printer manufacturers out there and there are some considerations to go with that yeah we put the paper down because I feel like I got a lot to say on this one so there are lots of different manufacturers out there you know we hear us talk about the different manufacturers with the lasers same thing with these UV printers you really want to go with a reputable company that you're confident is going to be there to help you and support you in what you need well I think it's your level of comfort with technology tinkering and figuring stuff out so if you don't want to figure anything out maybe you get a us-based company that has support that could come out and show you how to use your uh machine that can come out and support you with your machine they will be there with you every step of the way they will help you set it up they will show you how to use it and they will help you they will going to be at the other end of that phone if you make a phone call at any time now on the other side of that coin you can get something from overseas where you have minimal support maybe no support you have to figure stuff out on your own or do it through YouTube videos sometimes they do have support but that support doesn't start until about 900 p.m. our time so you could be up to the we hours of the morning working with their support so those are some of the things you need to consider well back to the cost to get that support and that handh holding you're going to pay a little bit more money you're going to pay a lot more money lot more money uh if you're going to be able to do it on your own let's say you've been uh you're some got like an engineering background Garrett is very handy well I was a systems engineer prior to all of this so he could pretty much fix anything and I knew if that were the well I've also been very handy yeah I I actually broke it and I haven't been able to touch it since I broke it I always have been handy so it doesn't scare me to get in there and figure out how it works I also was in a development background so I love to figure out it's like a puzzle how is this thing working and I'll be able to fix it so that doesn't scare me so we knew that we could take a a minimal investment a reputable company but a little lower investment for less handholding and we probably saved between 60 and 70% of the cost by getting it overseas with no support a little they did help me set it up they spent that first week they spent hours upon hours upon hours with me getting it all set up but since then I haven't spoken to so since then I've been figuring things out on my own um I have YouTube videos I had to learn a lot about humidity and factors that's right did I talk about it in here somewhere I got my little notes here no I don't think so it's not coming up so somewhere in here I did mention something else to consider and learning when you're learning these machines is just environmental factors in the fact that seasons change and it's going to impact your print so I've been following along these groups groups and I see other people experiencing the same things I have well during the winter we had a problem with static and when it would get staticky the print would get blurry it look fuzzy and figure out what the issue was there and then when the other day when it was raining and it was hot it got too humid and the it just looks thick the well the um the varnish layer isn't drying like it's supposed to I I still haven't quite figured that out yet but that's just there's always something that I'm tinkering with as I'm learning new new things again I've only had this well since November so what are we in 6 months 5 months less than 6 months I've been playing with this but I've learned so much and you'll see how quickly you can kind of learn understand and just get immersed into it there's so much to learn and it's so fun there's so many things you can do it is so fun I think it's fun so if if that doesn't sound exciting to you then you may want to add some sort of an investment but really have somebody who's going to Hold Your Hand and and help you along the way and be there anytime you have a question you can pick up the phone um but that comes with a cost like we said oh and last but not least number 10 number 10 explore demonstrations in training go to where the UV printers are put your hands on them watch how they work talk to the people we actually got to go to the international sign Association Expo last year last April in Florida in Florida where we had some soft requirements going in but one of the reasons that we went is because we knew that a lot of manufacturers of UV printers will be there be able to get to see them work ask questions and that that visit actually really helped us form up our requirements yes yes we learned so much we spent a full day walking through there we could have spent the full three days walking through there talking to different manufacturers I got to learn I mean I would love that's where we learned about varnish and spot varnish I had no idea about that until we actually got to talk to them and I was like why is this spot shiny and this spot's not and he's like oh let me show you I'm super jealous I would love uh the foot for the 4 foot by 8T we saw some huge well even bigger than that right they bigger than that there was like 10t 16t they get crazy big those are huge signs that is definitely a commercial uh investment that's hundreds of thousands of dollars of an investment for that said I mean I guess the bed sizes can go from anywhere from like the sheet of paper 8 and 1/2 by 11 in up to like 8 1/2 by 11 ft so yes yes yeah the bed size is VAR throughout manufacturers and whatever you want to do with it but we really like he said understood more about the varnish understood more about the inks there are something else we didn't talk about is there are different types of inks and so there's me M associated with switching out oh that was part of our maintenance um item there more switching out your different inks so if you're doing something things require soft inks like the roll to roll printer uses soft ink because I'm going to use it and form it on to type of to some type of thing whereas our flatbed printer uses hard inks which aren't meant to really uh be applied to things flexible type things flexible type things it'll do great printing right on the surface but it's not really meant to flex and bend but there are special inks that can do that but there's maintenance that comes with that because you have to drain your printer add your soft inks come back come back to hard inks whatever it might be so there's different types of inks and maintenance associated with switching those out but we learned a lot about the different types of inks while we were at the sign Expo what else the bed types bed types head types oh yeah the print heads and the different lamp types some have one lamp some have two um just a just a bunch of just a bunch of we highly recommend if you're going to make a huge investment for a UV printer go look touch and feel yeah go go to one of those Expos I really think you're going to find it worth it we we really learned a lot that's how we came up with these 10 requirements right that's how we came up with the requirements okay so lastly let's talk about pros and cons of owning a UV printer all right we'll do oh did you yeah it's right oh it's right here it's right in front of me all right I will do Pros oh I'm good cop I get to be bad cop as per usual all right so Pros versatility and printing well we've talked about that almost the whole time you can print on practically any hard surface and if you're using like roll to roll you could place it on anything you can put it on Windows cars any hard surface high quality output what we talked about because it's flash dried you get those Crisp Images you don't really get any of that buzz The Fading or the bleeding they look great the colors look great the colors look vibrant especially if you can throw the white behind it and the varnish on top instant drying I love that it dries instantly we've had it where I've paused the printer it's gone across it's paused it I've rubbed it and it's already dry it is dry as soon as it lays down I and I love that I that's I hate waiting for stuff to dry paint glue whatever it is especially resin durability you do use the UV resin don't I do use yeah I I love the UV resin I hate traditional resin all right keep going durability well we talked about how these have been out there for 11 months still a scratch resistant still UV resistant obviously faded the colors look great oh you got a couple more eco-friendly because of that low vocc or those Vol volatile organic compounds that was a mouthful it makes it a lot safer it's a lot healthier for our work environment than those traditional solvent printers and increased efficiency because it cures fast it prints fast it looks great I can just pull it off the printer know it's good to go and keep moving all right let's talk about some of the cons associated with UV Printing and these are just maybe not so much cons but things to be aware of number one high initial investment you do have to invest in a UV printer and we talked about ranges of those Investments I think when we talked roll to roll we our investment is $6,000 versus the flat bed which is at least double that which could go up to Triple or quadruple that right I've seen them up in the 60s and 80,000 something else think about and we tried to say it ear earlier but I'm going to reiterate here uh material limitations this is for hard surfaces if you want to do t-shirts that's apparel Printing and that's DTF Printing and we have other videos on DTF printing but this really isn't for t-shirts bags soft that's a different DTF there's UV DTF and then there's fabric DTF that's a whole different ball game we also talked about maintenance requirements there is a regular maintenance to make sure this thing is running it optim Optimal Performance so you do have to make sure you run it every few days you have to make sure that your heads don't dry out that the ink is uh circulating through the tube so those never dry out every now and then you do have to clean out the heads I'd say weekly or whatever use one of those micro microfiber Q-tips with some solvent just clean the heads you have to think about ink cost these are UV inks and they tend to be just a little bit more expensive I still think they're relatively affordable for the amount of printing you're getting getting at I've not yet in the last 6 months had to change out my inks and I have been printing every yeah well I've been making some big prints oh I did do varnish once I had to I had to top off my varnish but that's it not the alarm goes off and tells you that it needs ink and then training needs of course we talked about training needs operating UV printers require specialized training so think about whether you have the skills or the experience um and you want that training coming from uh your provider or you think you can get that training on your own you just don't mind learning something new oh here it is I did have something about ink variations that there are different types of inks and there's maintenance associated with swapping those out so think about what you're going to be printing on on a regular basis can you just use hard inks and leave those in there or you're going to have to swap them out on the regular for flexible items so think about whether you're going to have hard in sof in Etc in your printer and what you want to initially put in there because this is the types of things you're going to print on a regular basis inks stop you or hold you back though the inks are probably one of the least important requirements I agree and that is it those are my cons which weren't so bad see not too bad that wasn't that wasn't too bad bad cop um well we hope that this video helped you understand a little more about UV printing understand um all the considerations that we kind of thought through and um debated over debated months of debating and why we chose to get a UV printer for our business if you're interested in getting a UV printer especially a roll to roll we do have a affiliate link down below feel free to click on that that'll throw us a couple of pennies and might save you a little bit of money flatbed I don't really have a discount code or a um Affiliated manufacturer but model down below and if you're adventurous enough to go off and secure that one good for you we also do Sunday Studio sessions we have a Sunday studio session coming up this Sunday so if you have any questions about UV printing that would be a great time where you'd be able to interact with us ask us questions a real time those are live Q&A sessions mhm we can actually take the camera back there and we'll play with the UV printers live yeah we haven't done that for the flatbed yet no we haven't that oh that's going to be that could be so so fun I know I'm in well I am about out of time I got to go make some more UV prints you got to go do some research and we will see you on Sunday oh and then Tuesday what and then on Friday again where we'll do it build it and make it big thanks to all of our patrons we love you guys did I leave you hanging that is the best community I love you guys I can't wait to see you on Sunday