How to choose the right heat press – a guide to Calendars and Flat Presses

Heat presses, including roll-to-roll calendars, are crucial for finishing printed textiles. Key considerations when choosing one include the ability to maintain consistent heat and pressure, matching width to your printer, and safety features. Opting for a more robust machine ensures higher quality and a longer lifespan, making it a sound long-term investment.

A great many applications now rely on printing with water-based inks and some form of heat press to cure the inks and finish the job off. Typically we focus on the printers but these heat presses are just as important to the final output and therefore to the business proposition as a whole.

There are a number of different options, depending mainly on the applications you want to work with. Turning dye sublimation transfers into printed textiles, for example, will normally require a roll-to-roll calendar. The process is simple enough; feed the printed roll of transfer paper together with the textile roll through the calendar and the combination of heat and pressure should sublimate the image from the paper to the textile, ensuring a long lasting print with good wash-fastness.

There are a number of factors to consider when choosing which calendar to invest in. Most calendar presses will use two drums with one for the heat and one for pressure. The key to these devices is the ability to maintain consistent heat and pressure across the whole width, which is where some of the cheaper machines can struggle. The size of the drums, together with the degree of consistency in their heat and pressure, will determine the production speed.

Ideally, the calendar should be able to reach up to 200ºC to activate the sublimation across a range of materials and inks. Some use oil to generate the heat while others have a heating element in the centre of the roller that is electrically powered. The degree of control over the heat will vary from one vendor to another but the more control you have the better as too much heat will damage some materials. Naturally, you want the calendar to come up to operating temperature as quickly as possible, and to maintain that temperature between jobs.

Equally, you should also look for some control over the amount of pressure so that you can set the right pressure for the material in use. They should all produce at least 6 bar of pressure for dye sublimation. Some machines…