Saturday afternoon and my mobile starts to vibrate, “The tennis wants to cover all of the empty seats in printed fabric, can you do it?”
After a brief pause, “Let me get back to you”, I reply.
After some back of the envelope calculations, and half a dozen telephone calls, it was determined that all of our ducks were in a line. We had the stock, we had the ink, we had the team and we had the capability with our Durst Rhotex printing technology.
The call is returned and the answer was a resounding “Yes, bring it on.”
The size of the print job equated to 4656 square metres of printed Polyester fabric.
The printing process was done by dye sublimation, in the same way that activewear is printed.
The ink is heated to 200 degrees celsius, the temperature at which it fixes to the polyester.
Each panel was printed 3 metres wide and stitched together to form a total of 18 sections.
The total number of linear metres of printing and sewing was 1.5 kilometers, the print process took a total of 26 hours.
Vivad had two teams, split into two 12-hour shifts. This was to keep the process of printing, sublimating, trimming and sewing running continuously around the clock. We kept on going until the job was done.
Everything was done at Vivad’s Melbourne facility in Campbellfield by our amazing team of can-do operators. Now we are catching up on some well-deserved sleep.
We are incredibly grateful to Tennis Australia for the opportunity to demonstrate what Australian manufacturing is capable of.
