How To Print On Metal Packaging
Printing plays a pretty important role in making a lasting impression with personalized tins. We offer various printing and customization techniques to create a custom tin that will fully represent your brand.
Let’s learn the main printing that Tinspkg mainly proceeds for customer orders.
What type of printing is used for food packaging?
For food packaging, safety and eco-friendly is the mostly important thing. We only use high-quality metal tinplate and food-grade printing & coating ink to make sure our metal tin products winning the customers.
We mainly offer lithography as an option for your full-coverage design or custom tin color. To get full printed coverage, the metal tinplate must be printed before the tin is made and shaped at the factory. Due to the nature of this process, the minimum order is much higher than it is for silk screen or digital printing.
Silk-screened and digitally-printed tins have a relatively quick turnaround, but lithography is a more involved process at every step, so the lead time is much longer.
If you need your customized tins in less than a month, to order stock tin cans without customization or having silk screen or digitally print a smaller quantity of tins that’s a good option. While Tinspkg currently only accepts custom Offest printing( lithography) orders.
Offset printing, also called offset lithography, is a method of mass-production printing in which the images on metal plates are transferred (offset) to rubber blankets or rollers and then to the print media.
The print media, usually paper, does not come into direct contact with the metal plates. Offset printing is the highest quality printing option available, offering exceptionally crisp details of any design. Popular for its finishing capabilities and vibrant color output, offset printing is ideal for creating retail and luxury packaging.
The steps of regular CMYK offset printing logo or pattern
Factors affecting delivery time
Lead times for lithography are longer or shorter depending on the order quantity. The printing minimum quantity is 1500 pieces tinplate sheet and sheet size is generally 1085*960mm.
For order quantities 50k pcs-small tins, or 30K pcs-medium size tins, or 10K pcs- large size tin boxes, these quantities are enough to meet the printing minimum the printing lead time for them is 7-10 days.
For other small quantities of over 3000 pieces, we may need more time to arrange printing setup to meet this MOQ. That would take about 10-15 days or more as we need to get all of the tins with same printing requirements on the same tinplate. The advantage of proceeding this is we help to save your high printing setup cost.
For small orders, You can see below the tinplate sheet and there are many different tin orders on the same sheet. They are different tin boxes with different sizes and shapes.
make sure the printing quality
Ink and professional technical staff play an important role in tinplate printing
Tinplate printing uses the principle of lithographic offset printing, which uses the repelling physical properties of ink and water and the printing pressure to transfer the artwork and text to tinplate via blanket.
For tinplate has special physical and chemical properties and reprocessing performance, its printing process is somewhat different from ordinary offset printing.
An experienced and professional technical staff can help get the accurate and correct color ink fast to make sure Tinspkg’s effeciency to win the market.
what are the special requirements for ink, kindly check below:
1. good adhesion and mechanical properties
Printed tinplate needs to be cut, bent and stretched before they can be made into the tin box. Therefore, the printing ink is required to have good adhesion and mechanical properties.
2. Requirements for Printing ink
Tin box with white base printing White is the primary color of all pictures, which has high brightness. The whiteness is an important quality factor of tinplate printing products, so it requires white ink has good cohesion with the ground ink, which will not turn yellow or fade after several times of high-temperature baking and steam. Applying ground ink to the tinplate can increase the adhesion of the tinplate which is good for white ink adhesion.
Tin box with partial metallic printing -To make the surface of tinplate a metallic look, varnishing is needed before printing. After that, print white ink for the artwork which request white base. The next step is to print other colors before the final varnish.
Tin box with full metallic printing– Before any colors, tinplate sheet needs to be varnished.
The common ground ink is epoxy amine type with the characteristics of light color, non-yellow and non-aging after baking for many times and processing properties of good flexibility and impact resistance.
3. Requirements for color ink
The color ink for tinplate printing should not only have a certain degree of water resistance but also have some special character. As the surface of tinplate does not penetrate water and solvent, it needs to be baked and dried, so its ink should be thermosetting. It has a high requirement on tinting strength and durability.
In addition to the basic properties of general offset ink, iron ink should also have heat resistance, strong adhesion of ink film, impact resistance, good hardness, cooking resistance and light resistance and so on.
4. Drying process of ink
In the production of tinplate printing, ink drying is a complex physical and chemical reaction process. To control the ink drying spread reasonably and its physical and chemical mechanism well, then we can effectively carry out printing operations fast and ensure the printing quality.
If the ink dries too fast, it will reduce the normal transmission performance of the ink and affect the normal production process, like printing empty, light color.
The dried ink on the roller and forme will block the transfer of ink, and then cause the printing plate graphic dry knot layer to expand outwards; If the ink drying fast, more desiccants are needed and will cause the ink adsorption ability to higher which will cause the blank part dirty and so on.
On the other hand, if the ink drying too slow can cause bad trapping, bad adhesion and firmness performance lower; it is easy to cause scratches in the transmission process. So ink drying speed should be appropriate, too fast and too slow is unfavorable.
After one order printing finished, another order with different printing requirements workers need to wash the machine below:
5. Special structure of printing equipment
Because of the difference in printing products, the tinplate printing machine is different from the paper offset press. Tinplate is insoluble in Water and does not absorb solvent, so printing ink needs to be baked at high temperatures to make it volatilization and form film and curing. Therefore, a drying room is required during the printing process. Every printing step finished, tinplate need go through oven.
The total length of the tinplate printing automatic line is about 50 meters, so it has large and precision property. In addition, the tinplate printing machine is controlled by magnet splitting and double splitting, and the high hardness of tinplate also determines that the advanced continuous iron conveying system cannot be used in the printing process, which is different from the paper offset press in the structure of feeding section, alignment system and stacking section.
Custom Printing Capabilities
Showcase stunning graphics and effects with Tinspkg’s superior custom printing. Our capabilities include special varnishes, transparent inks, foilless designs, and more for maximum visual appeal.
Use spot or overall specialty varnishes like gloss, satin, and textured to make designs pop. Showcase the natural reflectivity of tin shining through translucent colors and coats. Emboss with or without graphics for tangible dimension.
All our techniques are achieved sustainably. Our experts can recommend the ideal printing enhancements to make your custom tin irresistible on shelves. From concept to finished product, we handle every step of the printing process in-house to perfection.
Partner with Tinspkg to realize the full potential of custom metal packaging printing. Discover cutting-edge techniques to make your tins captivating works of art.
Check more possibility for your product brand with new custom high quality printed packaging tins.