Coating on one side, in one direction with S / thin thread mesh

[ZooCity]

We've played with this a little bit here and I haven't noticed a big difference in the 2/1 (substrate/squeegee respectively) coat method, rotating 180˚ between sides and simply doing a 3 pass on the substrate side. 

With all of our mesh selected for max open area the emulsion just seems to flow, both when coating and during the drying process where, even coating on the substrate side only and drying substrate side down, it still flows through and behaves like a traditional 2/1 coat. 

Are any S or thin thread mesh users just coating in one direction, from one side successfully?  Have you found it to limit your screen coating in any way?

[jvanick]

We do 1 coat round shirt side only and are still getting 20% eom.. any other coating technique ended at 50%+ eom.

[ZooCity]

Great, so eom can be checked off.

How about bridging/encapsulation of the emulsion around the mesh?  I'm guessing 1-2 slow enough coats on the substrate side would work but I like the action of the passing the emulsion back/forth through the mesh to squeeze out air.  At least that sounds important in my head.

[jvanick]

no problems in what I've seen when using a microscope to check the screens.

I'll grab some pics tomorrow.

when coating, you can see such a thick coating of emulsion on the squeegee side of the screen that it's like a glisten coating on T mesh with 2 or 3 passes...

[mimosatexas]

I'm going to start trying this I think...

I currently coat 1/1 with the monster max, which isn't really sharp or round, and the squeegee side is more of a cleanup/insurance coat then trying to thicken the stencil.

[ericheartsu]

I'd imagine all of this would work with HSA/DC if exposed properly?

[ZooCity]

Exciting,  could be a major time saver.

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[jvanick]

I'd imagine all of this would work with HSA/DC if exposed properly?

yup. we run a ton of HSA/DC on these screens every day.  if you're using something like PHU make sure you post expose... but no issues at all.

I think what's happening is that the screen openings are so large that no matter what coating technique you use the emulsion all ends up on the bottom of the screen anyways vs the normal surface tension 'holding' it on top with T mesh.

[ericheartsu]

this is awesome. I'm super excited to try it.

Are you coating 2/0 with PHU? round edge?

We also just got our auto coater up and running, still fine tuning it, but this is gonna be PEREFECT to test with.

[jvanick]

single coat 1/0 round edge PHU-2 (same viscosity as PHU, just slower exposing)

I will be very interested to hear how the auto coater works...

[alan802]

We do 1 coat round shirt side only and are still getting 20% eom.. any other coating technique ended at 50%+ eom.

I still don't understand how that's possible.  I'd have to watch yall coat a screen to see it how it's happening.  I might play around with that and measure what we get with that technique.  I know a 1/1 with most mesh counts and our technique yields about a 20% EOM. 

[ericheartsu]

single coat 1/0 round edge PHU-2 (same viscosity as PHU, just slower exposing)

I will be very interested to hear how the auto coater works...

we use the PHU2 also! so far it's been unbeatable for us.

[starchild]

As far as coating the squeegee side of the mesh- This is needed to keep the hourglass shape of the open areas through which the ink flows, an equal diameter on both substrate and squeegee side- It's necessary for critical fine detail printing where ink deposit height matters.

As far as EOM is concerned the height is a minimum to create a shoulder to hold the image shape- when you consider the low profile of small diameter mesh threads a specific percentage goes out the window.. Coat as thin as possible to hold the images shape/resolution and hold up in production and record that because this is your EOM.

As far as Rz value and garment printing - It's main duty is to allow the film to lay as flat as possible on the stencil during exposure, what if you don't use film but instead a CTS??

We want to strive for the thinness coat possible that will hold the shape and stand up on press during production. Low profile thin threads gets us there the most efficiently
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[jvanick]

microscope images of a 160S (160/48) screen from this morning.
 
PHU2 emulsion exposure time as 12 seconds
total thickness 72microns .... mesh thickness is 58 microns... 24% EOM.

I measured in multiple places on the screen and in the middle we were around 70microns, edges were 72... I'll take +/- 2 microns

coating technique 1 (shirt side)/0 round

sqeegee side 200x image:


shirt side 200x image:

[ebscreen]

Duuuudddeeee what did you use to take those pics? That's insane.