A Quick Screen Printing Walkthrough (2/2)

Welcome back for part 2 of a very basic, quick overview on how to screen print. When we left off we just exposed our screen and it washed out beautifully. With the exception of a hair that got stuck in the emulsion, but luckily it didn’t interfere with our design.

Now we take the screen and we put it on the press to get it aligned and registered. Before we do this, I like to fire up my flash and conveyor dryers so they can preheat as we work on this other stuff. Now back to the screens. There are a few ways that we can do this. For this particular press, I just took a sharpie and drew a line straight down the center of my platen. I take my original transparency which has all of my registration marks and I just match up the center lines. Then I tape the transparency onto the platen to keep it in place while I align the screen to the transparency that’s on the platen.

We have to tape up the edges of the screen. This seals up the corners and makes the cleanup process a lot easier. You can buy screen printing tape from suppliers like Ryonet and they work great. But honestly, I prefer to use this two inch wide paper packaging tape. I bought this from U-Haul and even though I don't think it’s cheaper per se, I still prefer this because it’s much easier to handle. I can quickly peel it from the roll and rip it super easily. It’s a lot easier as opposed to the traditional plastic tape which I have to cut with scissors. It takes me forever to find the edge on the roll—whatever that’s called— but use whatever tape you want as long as it’s not super sticky to the point where it could ruin the screen. So definitely don’t use duct tape.

Once I have all four edges of the inside taped up, I lift the screen up and add tape to the back where all the registration marks are. 

Now we have to get our ink. For this design I only need black ink so I just grab my container of black ink and put a dollop on the screen. By the way, I’m using plastisol ink. The brand is called FN Ink and I highly recommend it. One great thing about this particular brand is that it has a relatively low curing temperature of ~260 degrees (F). It’s also relatively cheap. 

I should mention that there are two main types of ink that’s used in printing on apparel. There’s plastisol ink and water-based ink. Water-based ink has a softer, more natural feel to it compared to plastisol. But if you’re just starting out, I highly recommend sticking with plastisol ink. It’s far easier to use and much more universal.

We’re almost at the printing stage. But before we can do that, we should run some test prints to make sure everything looks good. So let’s grab a squeegee and some adhesive for our platen. We’ll get our surface nice and sticky and I’m going to grab an old t-shirt or a rag, something like that and put it on the platen. Then I’ll use that to run a test print and see how it looks. If it doesn’t look right, you’ll have to troubleshoot the problem and try to fix it.

In this case it looks great and I’m going to use this as an opportunity to check the temperature as it comes out of the dryer to ensure that the ink is fully cured. Remember, we’re checking for a temperature of at least 260 degrees (F). Using my temperature gun, it was reading at about 300. Which is good as I like to keep it around 300 just to be on the safe side.

This is it… this is the step that we’ve all been waiting for. 

Aaaaaannd done. That’s it. 

This was all done for one single shirt. I mean, I printed this just for the sake of the video (and blog post) but we take our shirt in for all of it’s glory and we carefully pull it off the platen so we can put it through the conveyor dryer and get it cured.

Now it’s time to clean up our mess. While this might be my least favorite part of the whole process, we definitely have to do it. I’ll lay down the screen and scrape up all the excess ink and put it back into the container so that we don’t waste it. Then we take some ink degrader and some paper towels—or shop rags—and we try to scrape off as much ink as we can. It doesn’t have to be perfectly clean because the rest will come off with the pressure washer when we clean off the screens later—Which if you remember, we already did that in the part 1 video (or blog). 

Once the ink is cleaned up, I remove the tape and that’s… that’s about it.

Well, it’s certainly been a lot of work but it can be really fun too. There’s just so many different methods and techniques when it comes to screen printing. And this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg to be honest. But I hope this at least gives you an idea of what’s involved and how it all works. Maybe you can say you now have a fundamental understanding of what screen-printing is.

As I alluded to before, there’s going to be more how-to videos (and blog posts) coming soon. So stay tuned!