Japan Screen Printers

[3Deep]

Just watch a few vids from a screen print shop in Japan/China working on manual presses, I know most of you all talk about doing a hard flood soft flood etc , but watching these guys print without a flood stroke makes a ton of sense as I've had to do it to keep a halftone print clean or just keeping the print crisp.  Watching these vids I almost want to say not doing a flood stroke help with dot gain also, is there really a rule in screen printing that one must fellow? ain't the first time I've seen these guys print and they do a very nice job being on a manual press.

darryl

[Homer]

back when we printed manually, we never - ever- flooded...ever...


I didn't know about flooding until our auto arrived...and another tid bit of info, I never saw an auto until I opened the crate...how's that for poor judgment?! haha...

different strokes for different folks.

[cleveprint]

i also learned to print with no flood. ive tried it, and i dont like it! not sure why i do not either.

[alan802]

You don't have to flood for many applications.  If you want to print fast and with the least amount of pressure possible, and therefore have the ink sitting on top of the shirt then use a fill stroke, not a flood stroke.  I feel like if you're going to do a fill stroke do it right or not at all.  I've taken lots of ink deposit measurements using fill strokes, flood strokes and no stroke and most of the time there is not a noticeable difference by the untrained eye but I can see it and the tools can measure it.  If you're using standard mesh counts, poor blades, poorly tensioned screens and 35psi or higher to print with then you won't see much of a difference doing a fill/flood and not doing one. 

[Frog]

I started with water based inks, on fabrics, and never flooded or filled.
Heck, my first fabric inks were pourable liquids from a local company called Inko, and they would have probably seeped through and made a mess.
Plastisols, I was taught, were, ideally, not to be driven in, but rather just laid on top, hence "filling" the trough made by the strencil, and the squeegee then shearing off the ink that's in contact with the fabric.

[3Deep]

Allan makes a big point with the fill stroke if your using an auto, that's something I need to get a handle on instead of just flooding the screen with ink on my auto.  Always something new to learn in this biz here is one of the vids I was looking at some of you might have seem this already though.
http://youtu.be/v2mU4XS4hgk

[alan802]

A quick observation that might help others understand the why, when, how to fill, flood is the fact this guy is double stroking dark colors on a medium color and I counted a total of 5 print strokes on a white ink on black garment...which I would argue if he were using good mesh counts and using a fill stroke he'd be able to do that job with half the amount of effort on the medium and less than half the work on the black shirt. 

[mimosatexas]

I typically do not flood immediately after my print stroke unless it is waterbased ink. I raise the screen and rotate, then as I bring the screen down for the next shirt I do a very soft flood, basically cover the image area with ink but do not push it into the stencil.  I use a push stroke for the actual print, so this results in fewer overall movements of the squeegee during a run and is quicker overall.  I find that the soft flood with medium pressure and fast push stroke results in the best deposit of ink (consistent, sharp, less hand, etc)  I also try to do as high a mesh as possible to limit gain and the final hand.  So top colors are basically always on 280 unless they are gummy or naturally less opaque like some florescent inks.

My experience with fill/hard flooding is it usually ends up causing gain and less sharp edges over time as the ink either bulges out of the stencil due to gravity and spreads when it hits the shirt, or more ink is simply pushed through the stencil then necessary and mashed down by subsequent colors.  I can see the idea behind the flood and sheer using speed, pressure, and super high angles on an auto, but that combination is super awkward manually.  Adding pressure inevitably results in lower angled strokes and fatigue, and it also basically requires a pull stroke instead of push for the print, which just sucks over time...

As Alan just said, the way that guy is printing is also horribly inefficient.

[Rockers]

Prism are a bunch of wankers, take it from someone who is running his shop now for 10 years in Japan.
They are working a lot with grey imports, M&R know about it after I tipped them off. Same for Rutland. The guys at Prism claimed they bought the recipe for QCM inks of Rutland and make them now in Japan. Well now the international sales manager at Rutland is a friend of mine and he knew nothing of Rutland having sold any recipe as we met last year.
They sell fake roller frames too.
Sorry for being of topic but as I saw we were talking about Prism I got into a rage.

[3Deep]

LOL, I was just looking at the printing style, I see you know all about the meat and bones about them, wankers LOL!!!!

[noortrd]

Rockers is ther any good manufacture of plastisol in japan?

[Rockers]

Let me think,________________, no there is not a single one. Plenty of Waterbased ink manufacturers though. Over 80% of shop use waterbased inks as their go to ink system. Plastisol inks where introduced maybe around 20 years ago.