Silk Screening

[ezdays]

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.