# Can you rescue tshirt from a bad print?



## abhobden (Dec 23, 2011)

Hi, we have a DTG printer and are finding we are wasting too many tshirts by experimenting with pretreatment and machine problems etc. Is there a way to remove the ink before its heatpressed?, ie washing, scrubbing etc????


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## JeridHill (Feb 8, 2006)

If you are using white ink, you can heat press it then use blow it out with a spot cleaning gun. Depending on how large of a print it is, it could be more time consuming than it's worth. If it's color inks on a light garment with no white ink, you can't really do anything about it.


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## abhobden (Dec 23, 2011)

Thanks for the reply Jerid, yes it is white ink with the colour layer as well. What is a "spot cleaning gun" ?? It would be a small print usually around 6x4"...


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## JeridHill (Feb 8, 2006)

Those are pretty big sizes to try to remove. You have more of a chance of ruining the fabric of your shirt over larger areas. Here's a video that shows it being used.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Rf2gfY2yQ[/media]


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## equipmentzone (Mar 26, 2008)

abhobden said:


> Hi, we have a DTG printer and are finding we are wasting too many tshirts by experimenting with pretreatment and machine problems etc. Is there a way to remove the ink before its heatpressed?, ie washing, scrubbing etc????




Being that you are using a waterbased ink you are going to find that you will not be able to remove this type of ink once it's on the shirt. 


Harry
_


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## beanie357 (Mar 27, 2011)

Buy a bunch of shirts from thrift stores. They will take cheap for a hundred.
Or buy seconds.

We do this regularly for all our tests.


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## JeridHill (Feb 8, 2006)

equipmentzone said:


> Being that you are using a waterbased ink you are going to find that you will not be able to remove this type of ink once it's on the shirt.
> 
> 
> Harry
> _


White ink you can because it's a layer and it's not staining the shirt. Without the white ink you can't. But again, it takes a bit of time to do and for regular tshirts it's not worth it. Now try it on a hoodie, and it could be worth the extra time spent.


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## abhobden (Dec 23, 2011)

Thanks for all the input here, much appreciated. Might have to do some more experimentation, shirts here are over $5ea for a decent black shirt that prints well so it doesn't take long to loose the profit from the small jobs.


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## equipmentzone (Mar 26, 2008)

abhobden said:


> Thanks for all the input here, much appreciated. Might have to do some more experimentation, shirts here are over $5ea for a decent black shirt that prints well so it doesn't take long to loose the profit from the small jobs.




Please post back later how it works out.


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## abhobden (Dec 23, 2011)

Well, we can get the white off as you mentioned, but where there is black ink (on a green shirt), there is no white underbase, so that area is stained with ink. I guess we could re-pretreat and re-print, but we would need to align it EXACTLY in the correct place on the platen. Guess its another test shirt to add to the pile


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## zoom_monster (Sep 20, 2006)

I ruined a lot of shirts in the begining. I also wasted a lot of time trying to "save" shirts. This was in screenprint, Embroidery and DTG. If you can print XX shirts per hour and it takes you XXtime and XXchemicals to save that shirt it is hard to justify taking out a whole design. You are throwing good money at bad. My pile of shirts, became test swatches for proper pretreat and also expensive reminders of the process I needed to perfect. Just move on and chalk it up to the "learning curve". It will get better.


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