screen printing > General Screen Printing

Coating screens

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Lizard:
With a large portion of our crew at home I’ve been having to fill in doing art proofing and seps, embroidery digitizing, shipping, answering phones, email, screens, heck you name it. And while doing all these rolls I’ve been implementing and creating new work flows and processes to speed things up.

Well, this morning I had to coat screens and I stumbled upon something that saves so much time. I got everything ready, put the first screen up on the coating rack, grabbed the coaster and realized the screen was facing squeegee side towards me. So I looked at it for a minute and asked...  why can’t I just coat from one side?  What could possibly happen?

We use roller frames so I thought since we do get some drips from the occasional loose corner this might help reduce the amount of emulsion on the bottom side dripping through which is bad for the image. Secondly air between the outer and inner layers of emulsion (it happens if you have staff doing this process) would be eliminated since emulsion would be forced through from side. Well I must say, the screens looked as good or better than any screens I have ever coated. I can’t imagine Haworth much time and money this will save over a year.

Does anyone else coat from one side only?

brandon:
I assume not all of the "knuckles" or where the mesh meets will be coated completely or at all. But I could be wrong. After several print runs please let us know how it goes.

Maff:
We coat our S-mesh screens 0/1 , only the squeegee side, 1 slow coat, round side of coater. Our regular mesh screens get 1/1 same settings. When we switched most of our screens to S-mesh awhile ago we started tracking our OEM and were getting way to high OEM when coating both sides, so going 0/1 has worked much better for us. 

Id guess different emulsions could have different results depending on solid counts. We also have the vastex semi auto coater and it helps us control it a bit.

Sent from my SM-G970U using Tapatalk

Atownsend:
Yep. We coat 1/0 on Saati coater, slowish speed, squeegee wise only. S mesh is a must have for good EOM. Our emulsion usage / cost has dropped about 75% since switching to the auto coater and 1/0 method. 1/1 was just too much EOM, and now I only have two troughs to clean.

3Deep:
Great thing about screen printing is whatever works in your shop is your standard, unless your the type that like to follow the rule of thumb of the experts so to speak.  Just like we all use different types of lights to burn our screens, different mesh counts, different frames and so on, nothing wrong as long as you are happy with what your getting.

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