4 Color Process with a 500 Watt Working Lamp!

[MikeyDesigns]

Hello Everyone,

This is my first post here, I do believe. My name is Matt. I live in Sugar Land, Texas, which is just outside of Houston. I've been screening printing since October. Self taught, with the help of some Catspit and other various video tutorials. I've been a graphic designer for 14 years. I work full time as a Art Director for a family owned business that screen prints balloons and makes kites (I'll get some video of this), and I decided to delve into screen printing as a second income. It's been a long journey to get where I'm at now. Blood, sweat, and tears. The ultimate goal is to own my own screen printing shop with 5-10 employees.

So far, I bought a great used (10 years old) Ranar Elite 6/6 press. Works great. I've purchased a Ranar washout booth with a back light, new wood pallets, and a Ranar Scamp Dryer from Catspit. Thanks for all the help on that, Jonathan.

Onto the topic. I have a 500 watt working lamp that I use to expose my screens. It's slow, but works beautifully. My next purchase will be a Ranar vacuum table, but until I save enough from screen printing jobs, it'll do for now.

I like to use Ulano's QTX. I've tried many emulsions and variations, but I've found, for me, it works quickest, builds up a stencil nicely, holds up great to long runs, and reclaims quite easily. My lamp is about a yard away and I expose 295-305 screens for 5 minutes and 85-156 mesh for 6 minutes. I coat my screens 1 and 1. Sometimes, 1 and 2, using the sharp edge of the scoop coater.

To get fairly good positive contact, I use a piece of glass larger than the screen and print my film positive on the emulsion side. I set the film up emulsion down, or against the screen. I like to use Ulano's 13x19 film for my positives and I use AccupRip and a all black system with my Epson 1400 printer. Dot density set to 3. More than that and the printer is just wasting ink, IMO. To get this setup to work, your screen frames have to be flat. So if you have a wood frame with excessive mesh adhesive, I'd save those for simple block lettering jobs.

Here is a custom in house piece of art I printed for my buddies with the Bay Area VW club. 4 color process using the 500 watt working lamp. Such a killer setup. Although it gets the job done.




Some shots of the detail.








Here is the job going down onto a white Gildan 5000. Budget was tight and they needed a 1 day turnaround. 200 tees! I printed these in C, M, Y, K order. Normally I would print lightest to darkest, but I found in order to get a nice bright red for the car, yellow needed to be printed last so the screens weren't picking up all the color by the time I got to black. Squeegie angle about 80º. 1 flood stroke, 1 print stroke. Union Ink's Process Inks.

Cyan




Magenta




Yellow




And the finished piece with black.





So... you can get great detail with a 500 watt working lamp. Using a 500 watt lamp is just timely.


Have a great day,

Matt

[Catspit Productions]

Hey Matt,

What a great post, thank you! You are doing great. The print looks awesome. If the colors are acceptable with the customer I think this looks very good. Nice work. I’m guessing your buddies loved this.

It’s totally true as you have shown here, you can make decent screens with a low wattage point source exposure set up like a 500 or 1000 watt work lamp. A table top industrial black lamp can do them too. Determination and patience help when you’re figuring things out of course. I think that’s true with any exposure source.

200 shirts in one day with a CMYK? And rush screens/film positives? I think that’s great. I don’t think I could pull that off at my age.... LOL.

I actually like CMYK printing a lot. It’s not as hard as it seems I think especially when you don’t have specific color requirements. That can be an issue. But I used to do it on automatic presses often. I really have to make a design to do a CMYK video. I have a couple of projects I want to do for printing videos that are waiting for me to get busy.

[MikeyDesigns]

Hey Matt,

What a great post, thank you! You are doing great. The print looks awesome. If the colors are acceptable with the customer I think this looks very good. Nice work. I’m guessing your buddies loved this.

It’s totally true as you have shown here, you can make decent screens with a low wattage point source exposure set up like a 500 or 1000 watt work lamp. A table top industrial black lamp can do them too. Determination and patience help when you’re figuring things out of course. I think that’s true with any exposure source.

200 shirts in one day with a CMYK? And rush screens/film positives? I think that’s great. I don’t think I could pull that off at my age.... LOL.

I actually like CMYK printing a lot. It’s not as hard as it seems I think especially when you don’t have specific color requirements. That can be an issue. But I used to do it on automatic presses often. I really have to make a design to do a CMYK video. I have a couple of projects I want to do for printing videos that are waiting for me to get busy.

I enjoyed printing the job, but I felt like a truck hit me the next day. LOL. Oh, this shirt had a one color back, black, print with all their sponsors too. They were wanting the back in multiple color too, but I convinced them time was of the essence. There was no way I could've turned around a multiple color back too in such short notice. Although, the money would've been that much better.

That would be great to see a video on process printing. I think that would've help me along the way, but I think I did pretty decent, giving the time constraints. If I had more time, I would adjusted the quarter tones to lighten them up some. 25-5% range. They gained trying to get a nice bright red out of the car and a nice bright green in the font.

[Catspit Productions]

Yeah sometimes with CMYK we simply add the spot color we need to match in order to get those vibrant colors you can’t get so easily with CMYK. Technically it’s called simulated process but to me everything on tee shirts is simulated process because it works a little differently than true CMYK as in Litho prints with a rosebud or rose pattern being formed by the dots. But there are many ways to dot CMYK I suppose.