Images Magazine Digital Edition August 2018

TIPS & TECHNIQUES Anytime you need to heat press your print to make it smooth, you might want to dive into some tension research instead. • You need lots of pressure to print. If your squeegee is doubled-over like a capital ‘L’, that’s not right. The goal is to shear the ink through the screen and have it kiss the top surface of the substrate. With a decent tensioned screen, the squeegee doesn’t require much pressure to clear the ink. If you can see your print on your platen board, you are driving the ink through the shirt fabric and onto the board. This ‘hammer pounding the nail’ technique affects opacity and usually is why printers double-stroke or use a second underbase screen. In next month‘s issue of Images , I‘ll examine the remaining steps that will help your shop create the right screen for the job, time after time. Are you measuring screen tensions in your shop? Most shops don’t. Sure, they might actually own a tension meter. But it doesn’t come out of that hard plastic very often. Just how thick is that lint layer on yours? Screen tension is a critical component of good quality screen printing. As such, you need to create screen tension standards for your shop and use them. They don’t have to be anything super elaborate either. Screen tension recommendations • Don’t use anything under 18 N/cm – that’s bottom line standard. • 18 N/cm – 20 N/cm is only good for one-colour orders • Above 20 N/cm works for multi-colour orders • Keep all screens for multi-colour orders within 2 N/cm of each other • The higher the tension the better • If a “just good-enough” print is okay, then “just good enough” tension will work. If you want fantastic, award- winning prints, then you need to ratchet up the tension level. I’d use Newman roller-frames and higher mesh counts too • Nobody on this earth has magic fingers. You can not thump a screen like a watermelon and gauge accurate tension. Professionals use the correct tool. Buy (and use) a tension meter. Band-aids that point toward tension problems • You’re dou ble-stroking instea d of using one pass. Every time you double- stroke, you double the cost of the ink for that screen and add to the total production time for the order. This is inefficient. Doesn’t it bother you that it takes twice as long to print? It should. • You use two underbase screens for coverage. What could be driving that? • You’re experiencing registration issues on-press, but the art lines up perfectly on the film or on the computer. This shows up with the white underbase peaking out from a colour and not being able to move the screen around enough to solve the problem. And it’s a double whammy if the solution from the printer is to use more pressure. • Your prints are rough. If your final print looks like lumpy cake icing, this is a tension issue. However, most shops diagnose this as an ink issue. Marshall Atkinson is a leading production and efficiency expert for the decorated apparel industry, and the owner of Atkinson Consulting, LLC. Marshall focuses on operational efficiency, continuous improvement and workflow strategy, business planning, employee motivation, management and sustainability. He is a frequent trade show speaker, article and blog author, and is the host of InkSoft’s The Big Idea podcast. atkinsontshirt.com www.images-magazine.com 34 images AUGUST 2018