Spirit Displays, the London-based manufacturer of banner tensioning systems, has announced the latest addition to its range. Spirit-TEX has been developed in response to market demand for frames for lightweight textiles, and is designed to address challenging sizing and finishing issues.
The innovative textile tensioning system, which has a patent pending, is the only system to offer a choice of three finishing options for the printed fabric, allowing users to reduce or even eliminate the need for finishing. Available in a number of profiles, including wall-mounting, free-standing and back-lit, Spirit-TEX has also been successfully tested for compatibility with dye-sublimation, UV-curable and latex printing methods, making it one of the most flexible fabric display options on the market.
Of the several mounting options, a combination of industry-standard silicone strip application across the top edge of a printed graphic and Spirit Displays’s innovative Spirit-TEX Gripper along the sides and bottom edges offers the best of both worlds. Allowing for easy alignment with a limited amount of finishing to the textile, this method also ensures optimal tension coupled with the maximum tolerance for size variation.
With Spirit-TEX Gripper on all edges of the frame, fabric can be printed with a bleed area and the edges tucked into the frame using the Spirit-TEX tool without any further finishing being necessary. This not only removes the issue of precise sizing of the printed fabric – a complex area made more complicated by the typical shrinkage of these substrates after washing – but also allows much larger textile graphics to be tensioned. An 18 x 3m (59 x 9’10”) frame has already been successfully installed at exclusive London department store Selfridges, and there is potential to go larger still.
Alternatively, TEX-TAPE from Spirit Displays can be affixed to the perimeter of the printed textile to reinforce the edge. The double-sided tape with textile adhesive does not require any special tools or training to use, and can be used in place of silicone strip. The Spirit-TEX system is also compatible with industry-standard 14 x 3mm silicone keder.
In addition to being easy to use and enormously flexible, the Spirit-TEX profiles are completely recyclable, making them a truly green solution for fabric display mounting, and are manufactured in the UK. The full range of profiles comprises options for front- or back-lighting and single- or double-sided display, and the frames can hang, or be wall-mounted or free-standing. Spirit-TEX and Spirit Displays’s popular Spirit-FLEX systems are available to the trade only in stock profiles and flat-pack kits, or fully fabricated with LED lighting in the case of light boxes.
Hadley Weight, director at Spirit Displays, says: “The industry has been crying out for a simple, flexible display solution for lightweight fabrics, and we have listened. We are proud to be the first to respond to the demand with Spirit-TEX and we are confident that it will become the most popular product of its kind on the market.”
Spirit Displays manufactures and distributes tensioning systems for banners and fabric graphics, and has been trading in the UK since 2003, when Hadley and Alistair Weight brought the popular Spirit-FLEX Tensioning System to the European market from South Africa. Using London as a base to venture into the EU and other international markets, Spirit Displays has seen a steady increase in the use of its tensioned banner systems and continues to develop further variants and create bespoke solutions for the installation of all wide- to superwide-format banners.
