Pad Printing

Pad printing is becoming more and more important to industrial applications. Pad printing began to conquer market shares over hot stamping and screen printing in the early 1970s, especially in printing areas where other methods showed their limits or could not be used altogether.

For example:

- printing irregular shapes and surfaces
- printing of finely detailed images
- printing requiring more versatility
- printing on complicated substrates
- high quality printing on multi-cavity molds

Pad printing can be traced back more than 200 years when the first offset type of printing was done using a bag of soft gelatin material to transfer the image. The replacement of gelatin material came sometime after WWII with the development of RTV (room temperature vulcanization) silicone compounds. With the development of silicone transfer pads, the pad printing process became an exacting method of imprinting on products.

Pad printing is the process of transferring an image on a 3-dimensional object. This is done by ink being applied to a soft pad and then the pad with the inked impression being pressed onto the object. Pad printing can be used for printing on otherwise impossible products in many industries including medical, automotive, promotional, apparel, electronics, appliances, sports equipment and toys. It can also be used to deposit functional materials such as conductive inks, adhesives, dyes, and lubricants on objects.