Pay attention to the choice of pad:

Ink is transferred from the cave of pad plate to the substrate by a silicon rubber pad in the process of pad printing. Please choose pad figure and hardness according to the substrate and printing quality. Know how to make a pad as below:

1.Mixing

Pouring mixing emulsion with silicon rubber and silicon oil as 100:20-50 percent into a clean plastic cup. Beat up it uniformity By hand or use beating machine-mixxing machine.

2.Cleaning

Cleaning the plastic pad module and put it on the table. In order to remove the pad easily after solid, Please coating some Release agent on the mould.

.Harding Process ：

Adding 3-5 gram harder to mix silicone emulsion and put in a vacuum glass cover of manual by hand can vacuumized with 3kg Mixxing liquid .Start the machine for 2-4 minutes till the air in the mixing emulsions completely removed.

4.Pouring of Silicone oil & Covering Model

Taking out mixing emulsion and pouring into pad module. Cover a wooden plate on it. There are two kinds of mould, One is Transparence resin mould, The other is PET adsorption mould . Pet adsorption mould is suitable for commonly rubber pads. Transparence resin mould more suitable for making high quality rubber pads.

5. Solidifying silicone Oil

Solidification speed is related with the environment temperature, higher temperature,faster solidificationspeed. Otherwise, in order to expedite solidification speed, please put more hardener into mixing emulsion.

6.Optimizing Hardness

Complete solidification requires 5 hours. Adjust the percentage of silicon oil can adjust the the hardness of rubber pad. Less percentage of silicon oil will produce a harder pad. When you increase the percentage of silicon pad, please add corresponding percentage of hardener. But, too much percentage of silicon oil will affect pad quality negatively. Precision hardness of rubber pad need measure with Shore duromet

SILICONE PAD PROCESS IN TAMPO PRINTING LINE :
1 The printing cycle begins by flooding the etched area of the printing plate with ink (Figure 1). Pad printing machines use either an open inkwell (shown below in the illustration) or a closed ink cup, which will prevent solvents from evaporating in the inkwell. The ink must have a low viscosity allowing it to flow out evenly over the surface of the plate and into the etched image area.

Step 2 The top surface of the plate is cleaned using a doctor blade, leaving the printing ink in the etched area containing the image

Step 4 After the pad is lifted from the plate the surface of the ink film on the pad starts to dry, making that surface become tackier (Figure4)

Step 5 As the pad is compressed onto the surface of the substrate, the tackiness of the ink's surface enables it to leave the pad and stick to the substrate. The pad will compress considerably during this step, the contour of the pad is designed to roll the image onto the substrate rather than press flatly against it (Figure 5). In fact, a properly designed pad will never form a 0° angle of contact with the substrate, preventing the trapping of air between the pad and the substrate, which can result in an incomplete transfer of the image.

Silicon Pads