The feeding of infants and young children is inseparable from feeding bottles, and the printing of feeding bottles is also closely related to pad printing and silk screen printing.
Bottle shape
All plastic feeding bottles are of the hollow type, meaning that the mouth is smaller than the body. By setting the shape of the bottle body, the feeding bottle has various shapes, and the shape of the feeding bottle also determines the feasibility of the decoration process.
Round bottle
Maternal and infant experts recommend that babies within 3 months use a round feeding bottle. The inner neck of the round feeding bottle is smooth, the liquid inside flows smoothly, and it is easier to clean. The round bottle is made with a blow molding machine. Because the circular plastic mold process is the simplest, the stock on the market is the largest.
Round baby bottles are more suitable for silk screen printing, and 79% of round baby bottles use silk screen printing. Whether it is a semi-automatic curved screen printing machine or a fully automatic curved screen printing machine, it is a very mature method. The silk screen printing method of round feeding bottles is also particularly suitable for color registration. Those bright and eye-catching visual patterns are the first scenery for babies to acquire color perception. Round feeding bottles are also more suitable for heat transfer printing process, through inflatable fixtures, round feeding bottles get a harder cylinder feature. Accurate overprinting of patterns is much easier with thermal transfer printing than with silk printing.
As we all know, the thermal transfer film used in the thermal transfer process is printed with a gravure printing machine, and its overprinting accuracy is high. After being transferred to the surface of the bottle, its overprint accuracy is 0.02mm higher than that of silk screen printing. However, as far as the current technical conditions are concerned, the thermal transfer film has obvious defects in its retort resistance. It will peel off slowly, but those responsible mothers usually have to replace the bottle with a new bottle before the graphic peels off.
The shape of a circle is not suitable for pad printing. Graphic distortion caused by the pad printing process itself will become obvious on the circumferential surface. Unless there are special circumstances, pad printing is not recommended for round feeding bottles.
Curved and ring feeding bottles
Babies over four months have been able to grasp the feeding bottle through their own hand movements, with grippers, a flat structure, and a certain arc-shaped feeding bottle came into being. The mold for making a feeding bottle of this shape is more expensive than a round feeding bottle , but for those small workshops who want to copy famous brand products, it also increases their costs.
As far as the silk screen printing process is concerned, it is much more difficult to print a beautiful pattern on the surface of such a baby bottle than a circle. The precise positioning fixture, the precisely ground squeegee shape, and the superb silk screen printing technology are enough to make you confused. Curved baby bottles are also difficult to print with automatic screen printing machines. You must know that it is very difficult to ensure the uniformity of multi-color screen printing squeegee and fixture. The exquisite color screen printing we see in the market is almost the result of patient overprinting on a semi-automatic screen printing machine by manual operators with superb screen printing skills.
Feeding bottle with flat structure
Some of this type of feeding bottles have a planar structure, that is, one surface or two opposite surfaces are in a flat state. On the one hand, feeding bottle producers use this to improve their own design capabilities. On the other hand, this is actually a large Scale application has created conditions. Adding an automatic rotation mechanism to the shuttle pad printing machine, the shuttle pad printing machine can print multi-color overprinted feeding bottles, and the difficulty is much simpler than that of the automatic screen printing machine.
