 We've had our direct-to-film printer for about 30 days. We've done about a hundred prints and we're gonna give a 30-day review for you Right now What is up a welcome back? Do you like to do a builder to make it so do we and we have a new video each week this week? We're playing a little Cisco and Ebert and we're doing a 30-day review on our Poon-Hod Epson conversion kit here Epson L 1800 with the ink stirrer with the heater and we're gonna 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 has 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 so settles in the ink cartridge So as those tubes go to print through the printhead, 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 will 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 printhead cleaning on a regular basis. If your printer is clogged It looks start to look streaky Yes, you will have to run a printhead cleaning that's done in the software. You can just say What is it file? Yeah file printhead cleaning And even with printing every day You still will 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 printhead nozzle flush So we Grab 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 clean 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 things here as well We found that this printer will only add the white backing on pngs We have tried pdf's and we have tried jpg's But we weren't able to get the bat 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 it 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, we'll 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-shirts 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 at 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 a dollar 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 hundred prints and I would definitely Do it again. I think it's a really nice setup. It works for us for us. Yes, uh, you know Maybe we'll outgrow it if we're going to start printing a 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 It'll automatically add the adhesive and roll it right through the heater That's nice, but I think that setup is probably It's expensive. Yeah 15 grand or something. It's very expensive This setup was three grand less under three grand 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 a 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 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 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 This is glitter vinyl And you can see here I did this t-shirt for St. 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 Yeah, 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 green out And then layered the white right inside And it looks great Might be why it stuck better Yeah, because it 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 in 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 went into all of the details that we did So add your lessons learned down below Yeah, add them down below Maybe we'll do an update using your lessons learned Yeah, I think that's a good one And 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 out in 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 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 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 Patreon 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 out 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