Pad Printing

What is Pad Printing?

Pad Printing is a versatile, state-of-the-art technology, which can print on virtually any material or surface. The pad printing process allows us to place your artwork just about anywhere you can imagine! Compound curves, textures, and recessed areas pose few problems. Pad printing makes it possible to print on difficult substrates like polypropylene, silicone, engineering grade plastics, ceramics, and glass.

Awkward, small, and large parts up to 18″ in length in one pass!
From prototype to production, no quantity is too large or too small.
Consistent quality to your specified standards is our promise to you.

How does it work?

Pad printing is a wet process in which a 3-dimensional plastic, glass, ceramic, metal, Silicone, or wooden part can be decorated. The image is transferred from ink filled etched images in a printing plate to the part by way of a silicone pad. Pad printing can successfully decorate 3-dimensional parts because while transferring the image to the part, the silicone pad wraps around or takes the shape of the part without distorting the image; given some image size restrictions. Extremely fine detail and tight multicolor registration are achievable.

Our Facilities

Promo Products has numerous pieces of pad printing equipment at our facilities. We use the finest pad printing equipment that guarantees our customers the most consistent reproductions at the fastest rates.

Our pad printing facility contains only sealed cup pad printers. While pad printers are capable of producing consistent images at fast rates, the design of each pad printer creates advantages for certain projects. For example, jobs that require multiple images on the same part can be pad printed with a “multiple cup” pad printer. The designs of the machines allow our operators to change from image to image with shorter down time. Less down time equals savings to the customer. The sealed cup design is newer pad printing technology.

The ink in the sealed cup design is contained in a cup like the name suggests. Since the ink on these pad printers is sealed, the ink remains at the proper viscosity much longer. The operator spends less time maintaining the ink, which results in higher output. Again, higher pad printing output equals savings to the customer.

Multi-color Pad Printing – Up to 4 “Spot Color” Art

Promo Products has racetrack, shuttle, and rotary table pad printers. These are capable of pad printing up to 4 – spot color art images. These multi-color pad printers are perfect for large runs. For higher volume projects, we have a 4 – color pad printer equipped with 12 fixture stations. These multi-color pad printers allow us to provide our customers with the highest quality multi-color images at an affordable price.

Since these printers can pad print up to 4 spot color images in-line, we can produce multi-color images with a one-pass set up. We do not have to set-up a one or two color machine multiple times for multi-color images. The obvious benefit is close tolerance registration with less press time. Requiring only one operator, these printers make multicolor pad printing very affordable.