What are the Advantages of Pad Printing?

Pad printing is perhaps the only printing methods that can print excellent detailed images onto unique surfaces such as a golf ball or even a walnut.  It also excels at printing onto textured plastic surfaces and smooth surfaces alike.  This unique ability to print irregular shaped products is because the printing pad is made from soft RTV silicone material, and it can flex and move around a curved surface or a recessed surface.  Pad printing can print very fine text down to 3 or 4pt typefaces. Because of the thin layer ink deposit (around .001”) pad printing inks are specially formulated with 4 times the amount of pigment vs. a screen printing ink.  Furthermore, with pad printing, you can print multi colors on a product without having to cure the ink in between each color.

• Versatility: Pad printing can be used on a wide range of substrate materials including hundreds of various plastic materials, metals (anodized aluminum, powder coated steel), glass, silicone and ceramics to name a few. Pad printing can print on flat, round, convex or concave shaped parts.
• Accuracy: With high quality pad printing equipment (such as our microPrint brand of Swiss Precision machinery), the pad printing process is very accurate and delivers tight color to color and artwork repeatability. Typically, color to color registration would be ± .002” and repeatable placement of the image on the part ± .002” (with a quality nesting fixture and accurate parts).
• Durability: The inks used in pad printing is highly resistant to abrasion, chemicals and sunlight fading. Pad printing inks are available is 1 component solvent based inks, 2 component solvent based inks and UV cured pad printing ink formulation (still contains some solvent to get the graphics to transfer onto the part).