Frequently Asked Questions of Tattoo Machines Part II: Judgment

In Frequently Asked Questions of Tattoo Machines Part I: Businessman's Selling Strategy, I have listed four questions of top commonly encountered problems of tattoo machines, and now, I will go with another two further questions, which would lead you to a deep understanding:
Question 1: I want to buy a tattoo machine, but I find that there exists a huge difference of the prices. Is the quality in proportion to their prices?
Answer: Well, as for the prices, you could say, they most depend on their acceptance by the customers and the market reputation of the sellers. When referring to the quality, if merchants use soft iron to cast electromagnetic iron core and armature bar, then this machine will be qualified to perform well because soft iron is the best material of casting these two parts.
Question 2: How to pinpoint if the strength of the machine is soft or not?
Answer: Frankly speaking, there is no such useful way to get this out once for all. The most probably accurate way is to take pictures by high-speed picture camera to survey the distance of the needle retracting back to its needle mouth when the tattoo machine loses magnetism. If the distance is large, then the strength is soft, while if short, the strength will be hard.
The best performance of a machine is to insert much enough colors into the skin by the least penetration. If we don't count the hand craft of tattoo artists, the strength of tattoo machines would now hold a very important position, because machines with hard strength and high-speed of the needle would hurt skin much more than soft and slow ones. The reason lies in that, the needle of a hard strength and high-speed machine stays short in needle tip, with short distance of retraction, which then leads to few color dipped onto the needle. On the contrast, the soft and slow tattoo machines could better effect with more ink.
Well, make a little break and come back later. I will go with the different types of tattoo machines in the next article.

Frequently Asked Questions of Tattoo Machines - Part III: Types

In the third part of this article, I will still go on listing some professional questions of the tattoo machines, especially on the different types of them:
Question 1: What are the features of tattoo machine for lining and shading respectively?
Answer: Lining machine has a fast needle movement which prevents catching the skins, but the feature of shading machine mostly depends on each tattoo artist.
Actually, there is no guarantee that all the lining machines catch no skins, and most tattoo artists are accommodated themselves to the speed, strength and the softness of the machines, adjusting their operating patterns in order to develop high skilled craft.
Question 2: How to tune a new bought tattoo machine?
Answer: Many of the machines are pre-tuned; all you need to do is make a few changes, because the basic function and quality has been fixed out when they were already done in the plants.
Question 3: How to control the tattoo needles' depth into the skin?
Answer: This really depends on each tattoo artist's habit and different tattoo types of the customers' skin. Europeans get much stronger skin than most Asians, in which case the needle should be penetrated deeper into the skin to insert much ink. This is why many European tattoo artists choose large bouncing space of the needle.
Question 4: After a while of using, the contact points of the tattoo machine would get worn, which will affect their performance directly. How to prevent this or what is the solution?
Answer: In the spare time, in order to maintain them, you could loosen the rubber ring to keep the strength of needle invariant. If the contact point really gets worn, use a piece of new paper money to rub back and forth between the spring and the contactor.
Question 5: Why there is the type of so-called all-in-one tattoo machine?
Answer: This type of tattoo machines has two springs inside their bodies, making them called all-in-one. However, most tattoo artists choose different types of machines with specific functions.

Frequently Asked Questions of Tattoo Machines - Part Four: Functions and Tuning

In the fourth part of this article, I will still go on listing some professional questions of the tattoo machines, especially on the tuning and function of those tattoo machines and the parts.
Question 1: What is the proper voltage to the tattoo machines for the work?
Answer: Voltage used in lining machines is different from that in shading machines. Shading machines usually need 6 voltages for work, while lining machines need eight to ten voltages.
Question 2: The strength and the flexibility of tattoo machines would get down after a while of using. What is the probable causing reason and by what solution could settle the problem?
Answer: If the tattoo machine has the spring working with proper strength, the spring would not burden the electromagnetic coils with too much load, thus the coils would not be tired for continuous work. This is the best condition that keeps the machines working with a high efficiency for a long time. The only part that probably gets tired is the rubber ring, in which case, you could loosen it off when not working to hold its best performance for an enduring time.
Question 3: What is the difference between the long spring and the short spring? And what are their respective functions?
Answer: The measure of telling the spring short or long lies in the strength of it. The spring strength decides the speed of tattoo machines, strong strength generating a high speed while weak strength with a low speed. In the building process, it's very likely to get high-speed ones, because low-speed ones would make needle penetrating unevenly.
Question 4: How to coordinate strength, flexibility and frequency of tattoo machines? How to tune and modify your own machine according to this issue?
Answer: Based on the machines in the present market, there are barely few ways to make huge adjustment to the strength. The main reason comes to that it is fixed already from the strength of the spring. Thus, under the same condition of voltage, wanting a high speed requires narrowing space for the spring to bounce, an oppositely low speed, at the same time; the flexibility would get changed according to the speed.
The remained frequently asked questions about tattoo machines will be shown in the fifth parts, the last part of this article. Wait a moment, I will show you soon.