So I thought I'd get into all over printing…

[StuJohnston]

You print the pants with the shirts at the same time, right?

[Dottonedan]

LOL.  WOW.  Thats a big screen.  What kind of press you gonna use with those?  A Clam shell?

[tonypep]

Looks familiar.

[mimosatexas]

What are the dimensions?  I have been printing flags and a few all over prints these last few weeks using a 58"x46" with 160 mesh.  Works pretty well for waterbased, plastisol (white included), etc.  Currently I'm using a 30" squeegee and pulling by hand (lol).  Going to be building my one arm bandit here shortly though because my back and arms get wrecked on even a 30-50 print run...

[Underbase37]

Nice we used to print banners with screens that size.....by hand.

Murphy37

[screenprintguy]

God bless ya with that brotha!!! I did big jumbo prints for a couple years manually, nothing as large as that screen size but the 22" wide by28 deep prints killed my back!!! Thats aaaaaalllllllllll you !!!

[StuJohnston]

Yeah, these are for a clamshell for flatstock. The dimensions are 61"x49", so not far off of Mimosa's screen. I got this size because it is the max size for the next size press down from my press that will print 32"x48" so that I can print on full parent sheets, generally 28"x40". If I got the max size for my press, it would be 76"x65". I don't have a vacuum unit large enough for that nor could I handle the screens by myself

I can't imagine pulling a screen like this by hand. For a moment I was going to say that it will never print plastisol, but I keep forgetting about transfers. I got one 110 for metallics and three 230's for everything else for now, I am sure that I will regret not getting at least one 305, but I will probably fix that soonish.

I thought I posted this pic in another thread, but it isn't there. Here's a pic of my press with a 36"x48" screen in it.

[Dottonedan]

HA!  My first job was at a poster/banner shop that also did trade show type printing. We would be able to hand print banners and poster board at 48" tall by much longer than 96" long but I can't remember exactly how long. The largest manual press (single color at a time) had a squeegee bar across the top that it was mounted to and you would pull is along at a fixed angle. Did great spot color prints, but not for 4 color process work.  Print that color, and stack it. Let it dry and come back and print the next color. We had some auto clam shell presses also.

[Frog]

HA!  My first job was at a poster/banner shop that also did trade show type printing. We would be able to hand print banners and poster board at 48" tall by much longer than 96" long but I can't remember exactly how long. The largest manual press (single color at a time) had a squeegee bar across the top that it was mounted to and you would pull is along at a fixed angle. Did great spot color prints, but not for 4 color process work.  Print that color, and stack it. Let it dry and come back and print the next color. We had some auto clam shell presses also.

What you describe is the one armed bandit.
I also started in flat stock shops, and there were times, on certain big pieces,  two of us on the squeegee, walked down the length of the table.

[StuJohnston]

Once I started printing with 25x36 frames, I knew that I didn't want to pull manual anymore. Especially reading about all the pins and needles and surgery some of the gig poster guys have had to go through. I know it happens to shirt dudes too, but the runs on posters and art prints tend to start in the hundreds, multiplied by however many colors. Multi color flatstock presses are far more rare than auto shirt presses, but they do exist. In fact there is someone trying to sell what amounts to my american with uv dryers in between the head and some sort of vacuum attachment, I assume, for $50K!