Drying screens post-reclaim

[LoneWolf2]

How's everyone drying their screens after reclaiming? Looking to build/buy something so I can get away from the old lean-against-the-wall method

[mt_signex]

I haven't had the chance to build anything for myself either, but ideally I think you would want a horizontal rack that you could insert them into on the long side, with a drop and a slight angle so they would drain completely and not risk contaminating each other.  If it's a warm day i put mine outside and have sidewalks poured along the side of the shop for this reason, but during the winter it would be nice if you had it setup where it would drain through the floor drain or I suppose you could build a small catch tub and let it gravity drain to your washout drain, etc.

[Inkworks]

2 compartment horizontal dryer, small fan draws air out, intake is covered with a furnace Hepa filter, it doesn't move a ton of air, but we want to avoid stirring up dust with a big powerful fan, we're never is a huge hurry as we have a lot of screens.

[Maff]

We made a rack based off of Greg Kitson's. Horizontal rack, the screens stand on their side, box fans on top and a catch underneath that leads into a gutter to drain the water. I think we got the rack from an online restaurant supply store.  It works awesome for us.

Here's a video that shows his
https://youtu.be/gdfLUcmVg3E

[LoneWolf2]

^^That's exactly the idea I was thinking of doing, just wasn't sure about the fans and them kicking up dust

[Maff]

It hasn't been any problem for us. We have ours high off the ground as well. And the water catch underneath the rack blocks the air from hitting the ground. And the fans don't need to be on full blast, we keep ours on medium, unless we're in a hurry.

[Sbrem]

We've had a commercial dryer almost forever, but before that, it was fans. But a cabinet with 100°F and a small fan to vent/move air would help a lot...

Steve

[GraphicDisorder]

We have 4 storage cabinets and 2 heated Vastex Cabinets.

[Prince Art]

We just built a new rack for post-washout & post-reclaim, haven't even put it into service yet. (We're in the middle of moving & revamping our washout area.)

Will try to post pics at some point, but it allows the screens to angle back to one corner, while leaning slightly forward at the same time. Water runs to back bottom corner of screen, and drains to a gutter. It's similar to a normal DIY screen rack, turned on it's side, then pushed out at bottom rear to create the angle. It's also made so that the length of the screens go vertical. Slats are spaced to give screens enough room to lean forward.

I designed this to fit above our dip tank, so it only holds about 12 screens at time. The idea is that they'll have time to drain the worst off, then be moved to a standard rack. Mesh will still have to finish drying, but shouldn't be dripping/puddling.

[TH Apparel]

not the prettiest, bu we just use a big fan and put the screens down in front.  No issues with lint...although it's out of the way of the normal production area.

i've tried uploading a picture, but for some reason I can never get one to upload on this site...sometimes it says file is too large, sometimes it redirects me to start a new topic.

[LoneWolf2]

Anyone got pics of their setups? Interested in seeing what kind of size everything is!

[farmboygraphics]

We have a 10x10 room (built inside of the reclaim room) used just for storing and drying screens. We only have static screens so we dry them standing up on an old screen frame. If I need more room I lay down another frame. To dry coated screens I lay one down on top of the same old frame, put a wood spacer (in the box) on the corners and just keep stacking. After they dry they go up on the wall rack. Works very nice for us.

[Doug S]

Here is what I did about 3 months ago.  It was an extra rack so I bolted it to the wall like signex mentioned with a slant and angle.  After reclaim, I'm ready to coat in about an hour.  I haven't put the gutter to the drain on yet.

[Screen Dan]

We have a 10'x10' drying room that does all of the drying for post reclaim, post coat and post washout.  Given our usual volume it's getting extremely crowded, but we've managed to cope.

We have a massive 70pt dehumidifier in there and a small 1500w ceramic heater with a fan.  The dehumidifier is huge overkill for the size of the room...the wireless thermo/hygrometer we have claims it's less than 10% RH while empty at 120 degrees or so.  I don't buy that, I just think it's far too dry and extreme to accurately measure with a cheap instrument like that.

Either way, coat-to-dry time is about 20-25 minutes depending on how many screens are in the rack (usually about 20) and what mesh count (which determines how many passes, etc).  A full rack of 25 150-S would probably take 45-55 minutes, but that just doesn't happen very often.

After destencil we used to put them into racks, but after we put in safety rugs to keep the ground from being insanely dangerously slippery the wheels on the racks hit the grooves in the rugs, the screens rattle like crazy and make it absolutely impossible to keep the screens from getting contaminated...we tried everything, down to scrubbing and power-washing the racks.  So now we destencil two or four and walk them into the room.  When I destencil I put them into a rack, my guys just line them up against the wall.  Haven't seen a spot on those screens ever since.  These take about 20-25 minutes to dry until they are ready to coat.  If we need an emergency screen (an odd mesh we don't keep much inventory of) we can go from degrease-to-dry in about 5 minutes by putting the screen directly in front of the heater next to the dehumidifier.

After washout I prefer to put the screens into a rack, double spaced, with one side on a lower slot so the water can drip off.  This results in dry screens in about a half hour.  But the room just can't fit 3 racks and still be accessible, so these get lined up along the wall too.

With the limited space we make the best of it by only having destencil-to-coat and coat-to-dry screens in the room all day until after lunch while someone masks the jobs all day.  At the end of the day we change the room over to only washout drying and we stock pile the destencil screens in the wet room.  They'll be dry by morning and ready to coat anyway.

If I had my druthers I'd expand the room out to 15'x15' and double the heating and dehumidifier capacity so we could deal exclusively with racks of screens...but that's a dream for another year.

Either way, on an ideal day this yields about 200 processed screens a day, keeping in mind that reclaim typically outpaces the back end of the process where new jobs pop out.