PAD PRINTING

Pad Printing is an indirect and encavographic (bas-relief) printing process that consists of transferring ink from the cliché (matrix) to the piece to be decorated through the tampon. First, pad printing was seen as an art of simple decoration and today it has become a printing system capable of printing on irregular, concave, convex, flat surfaces, etc., like the shell of a nut, for example. Its great vocation is for printing small areas, but with the technological advances in pad printing and its development at an industrial level, it is possible to print in areas up to 300 x 300 mm.

Today pad printing has two basic types of printing (all indirect because printing is done from the cap to the piece and not from the cliché directly):

A spatula pushes all the ink to the engraved cliché in low relief and when it comes back removes all the excess ink with a blade (as if it were a squeegee), leaving just enough ink for the printing of the graphics of the cliché. After this passage, the silicone plug goes down to the cliché collecting the paint that will decorate the object.

With a very identical process, differing only in the fact that the blades are replaced by a reservoir of paint with a cylindrical shape (similar to a cup, usually made of ceramic for greater durability and resistance), which is located on the plate making the scraping of all excessive ink through an included border.