Ninety-nine percent of the time there is a problem with the power supply you are connecting to. You are plugging the flash dryer into an outlet with insufficient voltage or amperage.
To be safe, give your flash or conveyor dryer 10 minutes to reach its operating temperature.
Tests indicate that the shirt board will increase to about 140º F after an hour of typical use. This is a benefit as it will decrease your flash time. However, take this increase into account when flashing by checking the ink for tackiness on a regular basis. Adjust the heater away from the shirt board if you notice the garment is getting too hot too quick. Also consider the Flash-A-Matic™, an automatic device to swing the heater away from the shirt board after a time delay. This will reduce the guesswork of the flash time and avoid unnecessary heat being applied.
If the scorch color is just barely noticeable or a very light tan, then it will disappear upon first washing. However, this makes a poor first impression to the customer, so you will want to adjust your settings.
Yes, but it will take twice as long. The water in the inks must be evaporated for a flash or full cure. The moisture-laden air absorbs the infrared energy, and this slows down the ink drying. The solution is to have a combination infrared and convective air heater unit. Consider our Air Flash® heater.
Yes, but this method requires from 30 to 40 seconds to accomplish a full cure of about 320º F, and will reduce your output as you wait for the infrared panel heater to cure the impression. It is more efficient to use a conveyor oven where you pull the garment with the final impression off the shirt board, set it on the conveyor belt, and return to the printing press to decorate the next garment. The first garment is being cured while you do the next one. Production can easily double with a conveyor oven.
The hot face should be about 2″ from the garment. This is a very rough rule of thumb. To get a faster flash you can move the panel hot face closer. To reduce the heat on the garment to prevent overflashing or overheating the shirt board, move the heater back away from the shirt board. It’s common to require less heat to flash when the shirt board temperature increases with production. You may want to consider a temperature control for the flash heater to avoid having to raise and lower the heater during production.
Black Body Corporation. The company was founded in 1967 and copyrighted the name Black Body®. A black body is a physics term representing a perfect emitter and absorber of heat. Since we strive for the perfect emitter, we like this name!
Infrared is electromagnetic energy that emits from a hot source. The energy emitting from the source goes through air to hit the first object it “sees”; transferring the energy to the object and heating it up. The sun is a good example, but every object emits some infrared energy. There are a variety of ways to generate heat to serve as a catalyst in commercial processes. Resistance heat is one of the most common where resistance wire is energized with electricity and heat is thereby emitted in wavelengths from 1.0 to 4.0 microns.
Ultraviolet (UV) is a shorter wavelength right next to infrared wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum. UV energy is visible to the eye (but do not look at it or you will damage your retina!) and has many commercial applications but not yet for garment decoration. For UV energy to be absorbed there must be unique photo initiators in the object/coating to absorb the UV energy. Infrared does not require the presence of unique photo initiators.
As you would expect, a very hot object can burn the skin if touched. However, the infrared energy emitted from a BBC heater will not cause an indirect health problem such as interference with a heart pacemaker, or negative effects from “radiation.”
Partially heating an initial layer of ink is essential to provide an under base for the next color (same or different) to give the resulting impression more brilliance. Without flashing, the color impression would be duller or changed by the color of the garment underneath. And flashing a color impression allows for another color to be applied directly adjoining the flashed color without smearing. A proper flash is typically attained when plastisol ink reaches 160º F. This flashed state is detected without a temperature gauge when the ink is tacky to the touch. A garment that is overflashed will not allow the next application to bind properly to the under base and thus the impression will fade later upon washing.
Actually, they are both infrared heaters, except quartz heaters emit higher temperatures with resistance wire inside a quartz tube. A quartz heater can reach the temperature for which it is designed in less than a second; however, this time and temperature can be hard to control. A quartz heater can flash an ink impression in 1 to 3 seconds and be instantly off. Quartz heaters are most often used in automatic presses. An infrared panel heater is constantly on at somewhat lower temperatures, but can still flash plastisol in 4 to 8 seconds. Infrared panel heaters are used in both manual and automatic presses.