Pad printer and screen printer are the common industrial printing machine in printing industry, because they are versatile and easy to cooperate. Pad printer is usually used to printing small unusual shaped objects such as pen, industrial parts, etc. Screen printer because of its massive production effect is used to print objects that have flat surface, also bottles.
There are the actual printing process of the both printer:
Pad printing process:
Step 1: Pad printing plate is the core parts of the pad printing process. Before you start the pad printing, you need to create a pad printing plate, and use pad printing ink over the entire printing plate.
Step 2: Scraping the pad printing plate to remain the ink for your designed images.
Step 3: Pressing the pad above the pad printing plate to pick up the ink. The ink will stick to the pad.
Step 4: Pressing the image onto the product. During this step, the adhesion between the ink and pad should be small than the adhesion between ink and substrate to ensure the complete transfer between images and products.
Step 5: Cleaning the pad when finished the whole pad printing process. Pad printing works usually use adhesive tape to remove the last ink residues and dust particles.
Screen printing process:
Step 1: Design your images and print them out onto a transparent acetate film to create the screen.
Step 2: Creating a screen. Once a screen is created, it can be used many times, but one screen only prints one color. If the final designed image includes more than one color, there should have more than one screen for different colors.
Step 3: Covering the screen with screen printing ink, and scraping the screen to remain the images. If there has more than one product to print, the screen is raised then put the new printed item onto the printing board. Repeat the process.
Step 4: Drying the process, check the final image and finish the screen printing process.