Label Makers & Heat Shrink Printers
Heat shrink tubing is a must for organizing and protecting all your cables and wires, but another essential to not forget is identification. If you can't tell by looking which wire or cable is what, then it won't matter. This is why a heat shrink label machine is so important.
Available in a wide variety of styles, from desktop to fully portable, they can custom print whatever information you need directly onto heat shrink labels and heat shrink wire labels. Most printers have a choice of fonts, special characters, sequential labeling capabilities, and bar coding, so no matter what your needs are, there's a heat shrink label maker for you.
At BuyHeatShrink.com, we specialize in heat shrinkable tubing, shrink wrap tubing, cable ties, expandable braided Sleeving, convoluted tubing and many other aspects of wire management. We can also create custom print heat shrink tubingusing a custom label printer for you.
A: If you just want to print labels to put onto your heat shrink tubing, you could. However, sticking a label on the heat shrink is not the most secure option. It can wear away, fall off, or be removed or altered. You also can't run heat shrink tubing through a regular printer for several reasons. One is that it would become tangled inside and ruin the printer. The other is that a laser printer would be hot enough to shrink it on the way through. The only secure way to create and use labels with a regular printer would be to put them on the cable directly and then use clear heat shrink tubing over that. However, clear heat shrink is not flame retardant.
A: It comes down to what your specific needs are. If you only do small jobs with a few bits of heat shrink tubing to print out at a time, then you can go with a small, simple printer without the fancy extras. However, if you're in construction, manufacturing, or other industry that requires printing a lot of heat shrink tubing for a lot of different components all at one time, then you'll need a printer that does everything.
A: Yes and no. While none of these printers use toner or ink cartridges, thermal transfer printers do use a ribbon, embedded with wax or resin, which is then melted onto a backing pixel-by-pixel by the print head. The ribbons are available in various separate colors, but only singly. In combination with a selection of colors of heat shrink tubing, this gives you wide latitude in color-coding your projects. For example, if your industry has particular coding for electrical or audiovisual cables, you should be able to find colors that work for you.
