How to Properly Weigh the Amount of Pretreatment on a DTG Shirt

	1. You must have a gram scale to do this correctly. The scale must be able to weight down to 1/10th of a gram.
	2. After placing the rolled up shirt on the scale, tare it, or zero out the scale. This will make the shirt “weight” nothing.
	3. After pretreating the shirt, roll the shirt back up and put it on the gram scale. This will now show you the actual grams of fluid applied to the shirt. In this example it is 19.3 grams.
	4. Remove the shirt from the scale and measure the width and height of the spray pattern. Multiply this height x width to get a the total square inches sprayed. In this example it was 15” x 16” = 240 sq. inches.
	5. Divide the total square inches into the total grams of fluid applied to the shirt. Here, we had: 19.3 g / 240 sq. in = .080417 g of pretreatment per square inch sprayed.
	6. You now have a gram value of pretreatment fluid applied to each square inch of t-shirt. You can compare this to the manufacturer’s recommendations per square inch or recommended amounts for a set sprayed image size.
	7. You can multiple this per square inch value by the total square inches recommended by the pretreatment manufacturer. If recommended is 14” x 14” area that equals 196 square inches. Here .080417 x 196 sq. in. = 15.76 grams total.
	8. Keep a record of your pretreatment machine’s settings and the grams applied. This will help you determine when testing the best settings and recognize if something doesn’t match up you will have a history to compare current results with past history.

NOTE: The correct amount of pretreatment will vary based on the dilution of pretreatment, the shirt weight, and the color of shirt. You will most likely have to experiment with different settings and do some wash testings when first starting to learn to use your DTG printer and pretreatment machine.

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