Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Pretreatment

Pretreatment in the past has been a huge deterrent for the newcomer to DTG white ink printing. You had to find “the sweet spot” or risk a failure of the print after the garment left your shop. This is not the way to run a business – not knowing if your shirt would fail and deteriorate when the customer washed the shirt.

What I end up telling people is, “Forget everything you thought you knew about pretreatment”. What do I mean by this?

In the past, with previous pretreatments, you had to use less pretreatment – and hit a very small window to achieve print wash success. This is extremely difficult when pretreating by hand, using a Wagner power sprayer. Even with an automated application system, though easier, it is still difficult. Image Armor actually allows you to apply more and achieve success with wash-ability. No more worries about applying too much pretreatment and your image washing or flaking off the shirt.
The leading brands of pretreatment on the market today are extremely reactive. By this we mean that anything the pretreatment comes into contact with will quickly corrode if it is made of metal. The picture above shows the inside of an aluminum pressure container. Each new aluminum container had pretreatment put into it, sealed up and let sit for one week. As you can see, Leading Brand X and Y shows a corrosive line and scaling on the side of the pressure container where the pretreatment sat idle for 7 days. The Image Armor left virtually no mark. The brass stem from the pressure container showed even more reaction with the pretreatments in Brand X and Y vs. Image Armor. What does this mean for the end user? Image Armor is less corrosive and easier on your equipment, making it last longer, less work on clean up, and less clogging of nozzles.
Crystallization has always been an issue with the leading brands of pretreatment. When heat is applied to “cure” or dry the pretreatment, crystals would appear in the shirt, leaving marks that were unsightly, making the shirt look less sellable. Image Armor reduces or eliminates this issues giving you a better pretreated shirt with little to no visible marking due to the pretreatment cure process. Just make sure to remove the Kraft paper or parchment paper immediately after the heat press is lifted or you can still get some crystallization from the steam being trapped on the surface of the garment under the paper and then returning to a liquid state…
Image Armor is a new formula – not a repackage of the current pretreatments on the market. It is mixed right here in America, made right here in America, and we take great pride in leading the world in helping advance the direct to garment printing industry in regards to this advancement in pretreatment technology.

Don’t assume that Image Armor is just one of the leading brands re-packaged. It is not. Anyone who has used it realizes that after the first shirt is pretreated and printed. When washed, the real results are seen. We are proud to be able to bring this technology to the DTG industry and are excited to help our customers Protect Their Image.