# Sublimation mobile setup



## tyetshirt (Sep 16, 2011)

I have an idea, but don't know how to go about making it happen.

My town is having a Christmas parade, along with our monthly community market(locals selling food, jewelry, etc), and I am interested in setting up a table/booth selling personalized ornaments/stockings. How do you suggest i set this up? 

Oh yeah when I say personalized it will just be adding a name/message/year to pre-designed ornament related to the parade/town. I will offer full customized ornaments but those won't be printed on-site.


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## deehoney (Dec 16, 2010)

I think Conde has a video on youtube about doing mobile sublimation.


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## HarpPastor (Nov 23, 2013)

When you say mobile, are you just taking a car, truck, trailer?
Our setup was planned as a mobile operation from the start, it really isn't too bad.

I would take a laptop, whatever printer you would normally work from and your heat press. Then just print and press till your hearts content. Seems like quite a chore to try and print up names or line up individual letters. Way easier to pack it up and get there a little early to set up. That is how we typically do it.


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## tyetshirt (Sep 16, 2011)

I will be transporting in my SUV and setting up a tent at the site. 
You say it seems like a chore, well what do you do when you run setups like this.


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## HarpPastor (Nov 23, 2013)

We just take the necessities with us. What I meant seemed like a chore is trying to preprint all the stuff you might need.

That is why we went mobile from the start, so we could do just what you are doing. We love it. We also get a ton of repeat business this way.

Going mobile is as easy as loading everything in the SUV and heading out for good times. Take your laptop, sub-printer and heat press, along with some beverages, and have fun. I will warn you though, going mobile is way more fun than sitting at home or in the shop and doing it. You meet some great people and make tons of good contacts.

Have fun with it.


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## valleyboy_1 (Jan 23, 2010)

HarpPastor, that's a good thing. I'm trying to start mobile myself. But I want a small concession trailer.


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## mgparrish (Jul 9, 2005)

tyetshirt said:


> I have an idea, but don't know how to go about making it happen.
> 
> My town is having a Christmas parade, along with our monthly community market(locals selling food, jewelry, etc), and I am interested in setting up a table/booth selling personalized ornaments/stockings. How do you suggest i set this up?
> 
> Oh yeah when I say personalized it will just be adding a name/message/year to pre-designed ornament related to the parade/town. I will offer full customized ornaments but those won't be printed on-site.


Most important thing you must know up front. Your electrical amps requirement and what is available. Unless you generate your own that is, and it takes a monster generator to run a heat press.

Also, I found over the years doing live retail it is a good idea to save some space for stock items, they don't necessarily have to be stuff you imprinted before the event. Nothing to make, you just take their money.

Coordinating your time is key if you POD at events. It is a good idea to have a backup printer either setup or ready to deploy. 

We all know that printers don't fail

Your printer is your _critical path_ if you POD. Heat presses are also critical but they are much more reliable than printers, safe to assume it will work if you have adequate electrical service.

Another point. Make a check list well ahead of time. Of course your need your heat press and printer ... little things like scissors get overlooked.

Something to look at long term if you continue to do this. Events can offer opportunity for photography, specifically putting peoples pictures on the products. This takes more space and more time so you certainly will need help in your booth if you do that. 

Chromakey photography rocks at events and can add a real professional look to your business.


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## cornpopps (Jan 8, 2010)

Make sure you keep your printer out of direct sunlight, my GX7000 which never clogged in its lifetime was put in direct sunlight for 20 min on a morning in the high 60's and the ink dried and clogged my cyan and I was dead in the water. Had to put it out of its misery.


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## uncletee (Feb 25, 2007)

I like the Fun and making Money part. bring ready to sell stuff. mgparrish above gets you thinking. have fun make money uncletee.


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## Justin Walker (Dec 6, 2006)

mgparrish said:


> Most important thing you must know up front. Your electrical amps requirement and what is available. Unless you generate your own that is, and it takes a monster generator to run a heat press.
> 
> Also, I found over the years doing live retail it is a good idea to save some space for stock items, they don't necessarily have to be stuff you imprinted before the event. Nothing to make, you just take their money.
> 
> ...


This is critical advice - lots of great stuff to consider! We used to do solvent printing at mobile events, but we recently switched to sublimation (mostly on phone covers, mouse pads, tiles, mugs, etc). We take a primary heat press (many heat presses draw 15-20 amps - this is equivalent to a standard breaker, so you have to ensure you aren't sharing power with other vendors), a mug press (which draws significantly less amperage) and a couple of small Epson printers (2 to print and a backup in the van).

The actual design process is the most time-consuming for us, but we are constantly working to refine that process (currently we have a simple local "server" computer running WAMP on a local network we set up with a simple wireless router - clients can log on to our network, then navigate to a special page in their browser to upload artwork and make design / product decisions). Most of our events are "private, pre-paid events" where we don't handle transactions at the actual events - we are paid in advance for a number of units. Therefore, streamlined production becomes our primary focus; look into printer load balancing software if you are running multiple dye sub printers.... You can set up a "hot folder" on the local network, so as print-ready artwork is dropped into that folder the load balancing software will automatically distribute the job to the first available printer.... We have eliminated a staff member by using this process.


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## valleyboy_1 (Jan 23, 2010)

Why did you changed from solvent printing? What did you like and didn't like about them? I wish they make a inkjet printer cutter with aqueous inks.


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## Flix Gifts (Jun 29, 2011)

Chromakey photography rocks at events and can add a real professional look to your business.[/QUOTE]

This sounds interesting, could you explain how this process works please?
I understand what chromakey is but do you set up a blue/green backdrop, take a photo and then print the photo onto a t-shirt?
Really interested to find out, I'd like to do something like this.


www.TshirtWonderland.co.uk
www.TeeCake.co.uk


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## mgparrish (Jul 9, 2005)

Flix Gifts said:


> Chromakey photography rocks at events and can add a real professional look to your business.


This sounds interesting, could you explain how this process works please?
I understand what chromakey is but do you set up a blue/green backdrop, take a photo and then print the photo onto a t-shirt?
Really interested to find out, I'd like to do something like this.


www.TshirtWonderland.co.uk
www.TeeCake.co.uk[/QUOTE]


You can technically "key" off of any color, but blue and green are most common. Blue can be problematic if someone is having a full body pose and wearing jeans, so most use green to key. Some pgms only key from blue or green.

You can actually do it in Photoshop without any plugins if one wishes with various color selection tools. But the various plugins and some standalone pgms. make it easier for the selection. 

I use Primatte for my setup, but there are other pgms around too.

After I take the photo then I just replace the background from the key selection and then print my substrate.


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## Justin Walker (Dec 6, 2006)

valleyboy_1 said:


> Why did you changed from solvent printing? What did you like and didn't like about them? I wish they make a inkjet printer cutter with aqueous inks.


Solvent printing was fun for awhile, and it allowed us to explore additional markets which we had not previously been involved in. However, we made the change to sublimation for the following reasons:

1. SIZE: The machines we were using weighed around 200 lbs each, so taking them back and forth to events was a pain and setting up / breaking down events took way longer than it should have. Our new sublimation setup involves a couple of small desktop printers which can easily be carried and transported by one person in a compact car - I know there are smaller solvent printing machines available, but after investing so much into our previous machines it didn't make sense to reinvest in more expensive equipment.

2. COST: At $13,000 each for our previous solvent printers, we were heavily invested in equipment (we had many machines) and if something went wrong (print head clogs, data board stops working, motherboard overloads, etc) we are dead in the water; I had 2 events last year that I failed to complete because after showing up, we could not get the big bulky machines to work and had to provide large refunds to our clients (these were pre-paid events). With our current setup, one of our Epson printers could literally explode on our way to an event, and I could snag another small Epson printer off Craigslist for $50 and be back up and running immediately - I will never be caught in a position where I cannot fulfill a mobile event or order, again. Among several other small printers, I picked up (2) Epson CX4800 printers from Craigslist for $80 total ($50 for one and $30 for the other), the day of an event recently - I was up and running with sublimation ink in about an hour and the event was a huge success.

3. EASE OF USE: With the solvent printing, there was a lot of "dialing in" the machines to accommodate accurate print registration; it was a serious chore, and we don't have to worry about that with our new setup (even if we get cases from different suppliers, slight manufacturing tolerance issues are no longer a problem for us). Previously, if the registration was off by a fraction of a millimeter, the overspray would land all over one side of the case, rendering it a misprint - the black-rimmed cases we used helped to hide that problem since the ink is almost invisible against the black plastic, but if you look closely at the cases you can see where the ink printed onto the plastic and it shows minor signs of deterioration from the harsh solvent ink (it is very minor, but it has bothered me for quite some time).

4. SPEED: When printing in a high-resolution mode, our solvent printers could only do about 20-25 prints per hour when doing one-up printing... We eventually moved away from the built-in software and printed directly through Photoshop using our own templates, which enabled us to print up to 7 in each pass.... Even with this setup, 40 an hour was a tough mark to hit (if we lowered the quality to an "acceptable" level, we could get a few more prints per hour but the trade-off was significant). With our sublimation setup, our Epson printers are automatically printing transfers (3 images per 8.5 x 11 sheet) while one person tapes the blanks to the pages and loads the heat press - a dye sub cycle takes one minute (2 minutes if you include downtime between presses) and we could load 6 cases on a standard heat press (2 printed sheets of 3 items).... Realistically, that works out to about 180 finished products, each hour.

5. AVAILABILITY: It is much tougher sourcing solvent-compatible products, as most manufacturers / suppliers here in the states are not as familiar with the process. Try going into Zizo, MyBat or some of the other big wholesalers of phone blanks, and they will offer hundreds of options to test out - however, the abrasive solvent inks either don't stick properly, or they corrode the coating on the case or sometimes even the plastic they are made from.... Once you find compatible cases it is easy to reorder the same styles, but in some cases we found that the amount of "pearl coating" used on many items to make them compatible with solvent printing was inconsistent between batches, causing inconsistencies in print quality. Overall, dye sub phone case printing is much more common and you have no shortage of suppliers and options for sublimation-compatible products. Try searching for "solvent phone case blanks" and "sublimation phone case blanks" to see for yourself.... The blanks for sublimation are so common and widely available, you can actually find most of the promo images you need to add them to your design software with minor modifications - for our various solvent blanks, we had to do glamour shots of each model we offered, because there were no decent images available online; that's not a deal-breaker for me, but it certainly was a nice change when I had no trouble finding new product preview images.

6. QUALITY: The quality difference between solvent and dye sublimation is a no-brainer.... This was the ultimate deciding factor for me. Not only do the prints look significantly better right off the bat (STUNNINGLY better, in fact), but the durability of the print is unrivaled. With solvent printing, a phone case seeing heavy use will show serious image degradation (fading, etc) within weeks or months.... Sublimation inks are much more permanent. I made a lot of cases for friends, family and regular business associates in the past year.... It was embarrassing to see people with their faded cases after a very short period of time, and I never felt 100% confident in the product. Check out the attached images for a direct comparison of the two processes, as well as some random phone samples I've done in the last few days with dye sub..... Decide for yourself!


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## valleyboy_1 (Jan 23, 2010)

So what sublimation set up do you have? Printer wise? And what type of mobile events do you cover selling IPhone cases? Do they have blanks for the galaxy phones too? How are you applying them on the case, with a heat press???


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## uglovdkg (Jan 3, 2012)

I usually do dance events and it's great to have a green screen handy to take pictures. I have my Ricoh printer, laptop, heat press. I Tahoe mouse pads, iPhone and galaxy cases, iPad and iPod cases and I also take my rhinestone templates to make name and dance specific shirts. This year I am thinking about doing sublimation shirts.


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## valleyboy_1 (Jan 23, 2010)

Are those the only market you target?i mainly do family reunions, but looking to expand...


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