Fricken' Lasers!

Quickly after I started printing, I ran into a bit of a problem…I noticed my pallets were too small to effectively do larger sized prints. Since I was still pretty new at the time I didn’t know all of the little tricks I should know as a screen printer, so like most would I consulted the internet. After a bit of looking around I found the pull off or overhand method of lining up the print to cover the whole pallet, and then pulling the shirt off to line it up where the print should land. While it obviously works because printers have been doing this for a long time, it took me about 3 seconds to realize how many problems this could create with print placement. Whats determining your print location is how far off you’re pulling the shirt from the pallet, and up until now this has just been something people were eye balling as they load shirts. That idea was completely unacceptable to me because I know how inaccurate the final product would be, the prints would be landing all over the damn place and no 2 shirts would be alike. Thats some bullshit and if I were the customer I wouldn’t be happy about it.

So with a job coming up where I knew I would need to use all of the pallet real estate I could, I needed to figure out a way to solve this problem for myself because there was no way I was going to put my name on something I wasn’t 100% confident in. First thought was I could measure them back as I loaded but that would be insanely time consuming and not practical for the long term. I could mark them all before loading and that would be quite a bit faster, but still not super efficient. Then it hit me….holy shit I have a laser on my press! It was one of those lightbulb moments where everything fell into place in my brain for once instead of swirling around in some disorganized shit storm. So I hauled ass over there to see if I was as smart as I felt in that moment and sure enough, my idea worked. By using the laser, I could repeat that pullback over and over again and land within 1/8'“ every single time and load shirts nearly as fast as I normally would. I swear I could hear the Mortal Kombat guy saying “flawless victory” as I rolled off that first print.

Since then, this method has been a staple in my workflow and has only gotten better and faster over time. So I finally decided to shoot a tutorial on how I pull this off to hopefully help out some other people with the same problem, and included the marking method since not everyone has a laser and I wanted to get everyone watching to start nailing the accuracy of their prints. Enjoy!