Event guys: Print t-shirts on site

For those who do on-site event sales, do any of you print t-shirts on-site? If so, what equipment do you use? I was at a soccer tournament this weekend and the people who were taking the "team pictures" before the games were using little hot pink P&S cameras. The quality absolutely sucked. I am in the running to get the complete event for next year. I was asked if I was able to print shirts on-site. I am rather familiar with silk screening and a transfer press. My parents used to do events all the time and I would work for them when I was younger. Thanks.

I do tee shirt printing, but decided to give up onsite tee shirt printing because of several things,

1 Outside work needs a BIG generator to power the heat press and your computers and printers
2 The Stock of different Tee shirt sizes you must hold onsite
3 The best printing media is JPSS and this is printed on by an inkjet and the time it takes to print an A4
while people are waiting is too long
4 If you are printing photographs onsite as i do then the person who is running the loading of images into the workstation and sorting and printing photographs will not have time to leave that job and start heat pressing Tee shirts so another person must be employed (more cost)

Thats just a few reasons why I gave up onsite Tee shirts.We do onsite Tee shirt printing but that is with ready made transfers

Rob

minkynuts wrote in post #10828119
I do tee shirt printing, but decided to give up onsite tee shirt printing because of several things,

1 Outside work needs a BIG generator to power the heat press and your computers and printers
2 The Stock of different Tee shirt sizes you must hold onsite
3 The best printing media is JPSS and this is printed on by an inkjet and the time it takes to print an A4
while people are waiting is too long
4 If you are printing photographs onsite as i do then the person who is running the loading of images into the workstation and sorting and printing photographs will not have time to leave that job and start heat pressing Tee shirts so another person must be employed (more cost)

Thats just a few reasons why I gave up onsite Tee shirts.We do onsite Tee shirt printing but that is with ready made transfers

Rob

Thanks for the response Rob. I have seen these t-shirts they print at other tournaments and, quite frankly, the quality sucks. I'm not too concerned about t-shirt stock, I do a lot of business with a supplier that does shirts/polos and get a great cost from them. Like I said, I've done shirts w/ pre-made transfers for years, but this will be "on the fly" job. I am ok w/ the labor costs. We hire the kids of friends of the family and pay them an hourly wage. They are also who I use as runners.

My friend bought one of these for his shop,
http://www.dtgamerica.​com/west/west_kiosk.sh​tml

After I set it up we printed a few tests on some shirts and it was really slow and didn't look anything like the sample shirts that were sent to us. Everything was setup correctly and the shirts were prepped properly.

He wasn't too happy and crated it back up and sent it back. ended up costing him about $1500, paying for shipping, and they charged him for the inks.

I recommend seeing the printer you want in person and see a few shirts ran through it before you buy.

For onsite printing of pictures, we use a pair of Shinko Dye-Sub 8x10 printers, which are great workhorses.

Thanks for the input Zepher.