Blowout Paper
In the world of sublimation, if you have a blowout, it means ink from a previous pressing session, has ruined the item you are currently pressing and you had no idea until you were done pressing.
Material used to protect both your heat press and the item you are personalizing from picking up and absorbing residual ink.
To prevent ink transfer, people often sandwich their item between 2 teflon blowout sheets. More recently, crafters are turning to plain, uncoated butcher paper instead of teflon sheets because it is cheap and easy to access. Over time, teflon sheets WILL become stained and that staining WILL transfer to your items.
Convection Oven
An oven that can reach at least 400°F and has the “convection” option. This options circulates the air, which is an important feature for sublimating tumblers and mugs.
Ghosting
This is when ink travels where you don’t want it. It can look blurry, or seem like you have double-vision. It can ruin a product and is often caused by poor taping which leads to movement.
Maintenance Tank
This tank is connected to most printers. It’s where used ink gets deposited. Some printers have swappable maintenance tanks while others do not. When they get full, your printer will stop working until they are replaced.
Nozzle Check
This is a function you perform on your sublimation printer. It will print a small pattern of lines in each color. Once performed, the results of your nozzle check will tell you if a nozzle is clogged. Nozzle checks are one of the first things to perform when prints aren’t coming out good.
Platen
Platens are the top part of a heat press that contains the heating coils. They can usually be swapped out if they stop working.
Power Cleaning
Used sparingly, a Power Cleaning can be done to your sublimation printer when nothings has worked to get the ink flowing. So if print head cleanings and purge pages aren’t’ working, you may have to Power Clean.
Power Cleanings will use a lot of ink and deposit that ink into your waste maintenance tank. Use it wisely.
Press Box
A press box is when your t-shirt (or other material) turns a different color after pressing. The color change is exactly the same size of the top platen. See our troubleshooting guide for more info
Press Lines
If you can see the outside of your top platen on a t-shirt, those are called press lines. It is caused by too much pressure or uneven pressure. They are nearly impossible to remove but here are tips for press lines.
Print Head Cleaning
This is another function you will perform on a sublimation printer. If the nozzle check (above) shows missing ink or large missing segments, you’ll perform a Print Head Cleaning.
However, many people prefer to run a purge page (below) instead of Print Head Cleaning because it could save time and ink. Only do Print Head Cleanings when there is a problem with the nozzle check.
Purge Page or Purge File
Purge page is simply an image or document you will send to your sublimation printer for printing. It contains blocks of each color: CMYK.
Printing purge pages will often get ink flowing.
Weed
The term weeding is the process of removing the unwanted parts of a vinyl decal. A cutting machine, such as cricut, will cut your design out of a sheet of vinyl. You’ll “weed” away the excess in order to have your transfer.
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