Items printed by the Pad Printing process

The many advantages of Pad Printing:

· Variety of substrates - Almost any material including glass, ceramic, metal can be printed with suitable inks.

· Ability to print fine details - Resolution is far better than that of screen printing in fact up to 120 lines / Cm (300 lines per inch)

· High resistance of printing inks - Depending on ink type used extremely high resistance against mechanical abrasion or chemicals can be achieved.

· Easy handling and little maintenance - Compared to other printing processes pad printing is easy to learn

· Multi-color printing: wet on wet - Possibility to apply multiple prints without intermediate drying

· Short tooling-up times - Plates and inks can be exchanged within a few minutes

· Low set up cost - Plates can be produced in-house

· Relatively low space requirement - Compared to other printing machines pad printing equipment is space efficient

· Low drying cost - In the most simple case air drying at room temperature is sufficient.

The pad printing process works by transferring ink from an etched metal plate onto a tube’s surface with a rubber pad. The metal plate contains etched artwork or text info provided by the customer. Ink is squeegeed across the plate and remains in the etched area. The rubber pad then transfers the ink from the etched plate to the tubing surface.