Rush Sticker Printing

There are necessary steps you need to endure before you experience the right printing process.

1. Provide your layout plan to your printing company.

The layout of your printing job can be your printer's guide in making your prints. Sticker printing companies are able to produce your desired sticker with this. Thus in order to successfully achieve the desired results, you must give a precise detail about your material to your chosen printing company. A well detailed process will facilitate your printing company to obviously know what you want for your stickers. Additionally, the experienced printing staff will make sure a quick and smooth printing creation that will assure clients that their projects are in competent hands.

2. Designing of stickers

Sticker printing companies provides you with various sticker printing plans and designs. From a variety of design samples to printing templates you can find what you want for your stickers. The illustration of designs and templates are very crucial mostly to those who are after short run printing or urgent printing jobs. However in case you were not able to precisely get what you wish for your sticker designs you can customize and do over the design of your stickers.

3. Production of the printing

There are different processes involved in the sticker printing production. If you are looking for fast printing service you can go for digital printing, in contrast if you want to go for huge number of prints in a single print run you can go for offset printing. Full color printing application is also used to add intensity to your stickers.

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Build your own t-shirt printing press

step 4Make your design

f you just want to have text then one of the simplest ways is to use wooden letters instead of making your own. Since Michaels was a kind contributor to a prior contest we recommend their wooden letter sets. On the other hand, if you want to make a design or image then there is a lot more work (unless of course, you own a laser cutter) to cut out a design. We decided to try an image of a 20 sided die along with the text "High Roller" (Copyright Kevin Dean and Ryan McFarland!) We experimented with materials that we had around the workshop. Red cedar smells good when the Dremel is put to it but the wood soaked up the paint. Laminate counter top was tough to shape and showed the blotting pattern because it was too smooth. Finally we tried using some foam from a set of alphabet foam letters that are used for a child's play mat. This was easy to cut with a hobby knife and took the paint well. It also was forgiving when pressed against the cloth.


step 5Ink and press

Use double stick foam pads to place your letters onto a board which is screwed to the LCD arm mount. We found that putting the letters on pieces for the foam allowed us to remove the entire word to position it or so you can ink different colors. You should be able to remove a cowling from the last hinge on the arm (closest to the print) and loosen a screw or nut to allow that hinge to move more freely. Now you can easily flip the press into position for inking and then rotate it back to parallel the shirt.

Use rags or old shirts for a few tries before putting your favorite shirt under the press. You'll get a feel for how hard to press, how much paint or ink to use, and how to apply the paint to the press. We tried using paper towels and brushes to dip into the paint and then apply to the "stamp" but we found that a sponge cut into smaller pieces worked very well - both for application and to mop up excess paint that may collect in the negative areas of the stamp.

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Build your own t-shirt printing press

step 2Prepare the table
This would best be done with a table that you don't really want to use for anything other than crafts or projects. You'll want to mount the LCD arm as low and far back as possible (most should have a variety of settings). You see that we put our arm on the corner so that the press can reach near or far depending on the thickness of the media pressed on the thickness of the object.

The LCD mount is great to use because it articulates but retains the orientation of the head so you can move the arm toward and away from the shirt while keeping the press parallel. You also can swivel the head to add ink or paint.

We bolted clear through the arm so that it is sturdy but if you wanted to be able to remove it you could use a threaded rod with a lag head with a wing nut so all you would have is the threaded rod emerging from the tabletop. Or you could mount the arm on a wall above a table or workbench.

step 3Build the platform
The LCD arm will probably not press all the way to the desktop so you may need to make a platform to raise the working area. If you have ever put in a counter for a bathroom or kitchen you might have a nice piece of laminate kicking around that will work well. Scrap wood will work well too - you just need to lift the shirt (and the piece of cardboard, acrylic, aluminum, or whatever you put in the shirt to keep the ink from bleeding through to the back) enough to make full contact with the press.

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Build your own t-shirt printing press

There are many other options for making shirts with great tutorials on this site about how to silk screen or make stencils. This stamping method has the benefit of being able to make more than one (a limitation of some stencil techniques). Also this style allows the use of multiple colors without waiting for a color to dry. You can have free-floating content (like the inside of an "O") which is difficult with some stencil techniques - and if you're just doing lettering the letters can be reused for another shirt design or another project entirely.

Step1: Tools and Materials
Table or flat surface you can bolt into
LCD desk mount arm
Scrap wood or counter top
Double stick foam tape
Foam
Scrap booking letters
Silk screening ink or specialized paint
Drill and bits
Screws
Hobby knife
Sharpie marker
Square, level, tape measure
Wood, acrylic, aluminum or cardboard to put inside the shirt
Cloth to print on

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Pen Type Readers and Laser Scanners

Pen type readers consist of a light source and a photo diode that are placed next to each other in the tip of a pen or wand. To read a bar code, you drag the tip of the pen across all the bars in a steady even motion. The photo diode measures the intensity of the light reflected back from the light source and generates a waveform that is used to measure the widths of the bars and spaces in the bar code. Dark bars in the bar code absorb light and white spaces reflect light so that the voltage waveform generated by the photo diode is an exact duplicate of the bar and space pattern in the bar code. This waveform is decoded by the scanner in a manner similar to the way Morse code dots and dashes are decoded.

Laser scanners work the same way as pen type readers except that they use a laser beam as the light source and typically employ either a reciprocating mirror or a rotating prism to scan the laser beam back and forth across the bar code. Just the same as with the pen type reader, a photo diode is used to measure the intensity of the light reflected back from the bar code. In both pen readers and laser scanners, the light emitted by the reader is tuned to a specific frequency and the photo diode is designed to detect only this same frequency light.

Pen type readers and laser scanners can be purchased with different resolutions to enable them to read bar codes of different sizes. The scanner resolution is measured by the size of the dot of light emitted by the reader. The dot of light should be equal to or slightly smaller than the narrowest element width ("X" dimension). If the dot is wider than the width of the narrowest bar or space, then the dot will overlap two or more bars at a time thereby causing the scanner to not be able to distinguish clear transitions between bars and spaces. If the dot is too small, then any spots or voids in the bars can be misinterpreted as light areas also making a bar code unreadable. The most commonly used X dimension is 13 mils (roughly 4 printer dots on a 300 DPI printer). Because this X dimension is so small, it is extremely important that the bar code is created with a program that creates high resolution graphics (like B-Coder).

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