Do any of our members have experience with silk screening?

I ask this for many commercial decals are silk screened. From looking around the web at hobby silk screening, it seems quite doable. It seems to very much be kin to photo etching at home...something else I intend to explore at some point. The only issue for me is that it is doubtful that it would make more sense than custom decals...as my On3 fleet won't need more than a few custom 8.5"x11" sheets. (I currently have enough decals for all of my present projects...except for my passenger cars).

After considering it, what it comes down to is that the cost of your equipment will be more than your finished product is worth. In other words, it would be cheaper to simply order what you wanted from a custom decal maker than it wouldbe to buy the silk screen equipment. They only way it would be cost effective would be to use the equipment to make things for sale.

Hi nkp,

Have you thought of using a printer with blank decal sheets from Bare Metal or a similar suppier works out a lot more cost effective a buddy of mine did his decals in a few minutes this way.

Yes, I spent many a year doing screening. I thought that screenprinting would be a great way to produce decals, especially white on clear background. The basic process is not that difficult. The technique takes a long time to master. What you do is coat a screen (which incidentally is not silk) with a light-sensitive film, either on a roll or liquid. Once dried, the positive transparent image is put between the screen and a light source and exposed. After exposure, the screen is washed until the unexposed image is washed out. Now you have a screen with the image you want. The screen is then placed over the material to be printed, and ink (thick solvent-based paint) is run over the screen with a squeegee.

Now that's the simple version. Just a few difficulties and pitfalls.

• *The smaller the lines and letters, the denser the screen material has to be. We used a 300 tpi (threads per inch) mesh and we could screen down to maybe 8 pt type and .o10 line thickness.
  *There cannot be any light leaking between the screen and the image while being exposed. We used a vacuum exposure table and still had problems at times.
  *Making a screen is not easy for the above reason plus about a dozen other factors.
  *If you want multiple colors, you need one screen for each color and you need to get each screen perfectly aligned or you can generate more scrap than you ever imagined.
  *Cleaning a screen is not for the fainthearted and frequently, a $50 screen becomes unusable very quickly.
  *If you don't use your materials on a regular basis, they have a finite shelf life, and it is not cheap to start with.

I have a box of screening hardware and screens in my garage. I haven't used it in about eight years for the above reasons.

How does silk screening to create decals compare with whatever is needed to pad-print directly on the item in question?

Andrew

MasonJar Wrote:How does silk screening to create decals compare with whatever is needed to pad-print directly on the item in question?

Andrew

Screenprinting on irregular objects has to be a nightmare, hence the use of decals. I have no idea what the process is to make a pad, but the application seems to be easy once you have one.

I've made some decals using an inkjet printer, but the colors are washed out and transparent and of course, you can't print white without an Alps printer. A pad printer would be a delight if the process to make a pad was easy.

nkp_174 Wrote:Do any of our members have experience with silk screening?

I ask this for many commercial decals are silk screened. From looking around the web at hobby silk screening, it seems quite doable. It seems to very much be kin to photo etching at home...something else I intend to explore at some point. The only issue for me is that it is doubtful that it would make more sense than custom decals...as my On3 fleet won't need more than a few custom 8.5"x11" sheets. (I currently have enough decals for all of my present projects...except for my passenger cars).

My brother-in-law does it professionally.