years old mesh with images.

[Dottonedan]

You known how people will coat a screen with something to mak eit last longer.  How do they get that emulsion out once they are ready to reclaim?  Do they need a special chemical to get that off the screen without eating the screen?

I'm wondering if I can salvage the mesh ranging from 110 to 305's on about 150 static frames.  The mesh still has strong elasticity and good tension. Wont know how taught they really are until after a good cleaning of one or two of them. You'd think that they would be dry rot after not being used for over 5 years and having the stencil sit baking in that mesh over the years. They were stored in a shed for about 2 years and 3 in my garage.

Was just hoping I might have a chance.

[Sbrem]

If a hardener was used post exposure, then probably they won't be reclaimable. If a hardener wasn't used, I would go at it and see how far you get. I have a once a year job that I do for a gentleman who feeds about 1000 people at Thanksgiving, I print his posters for free. No problem with reclaiming, standard chemicals. Hope that helps. By the way, Dan, I'm still waiting to hear back from my customer on the quotes you gave me. Have a great weekend.

Steve

[alan802]

We have reclaimed screens that had a stencil on them for about a year, but nothing with a hardener or blockout product on them.  Put them in the dip tank and they reclaimed perfectly.  The ink stained a little bit on the darker colors but the emulsion came off easily.  I don't think you'll have a problem unless they were severely underexposed but as long as they've been sitting around they should have accumulated enough UV light to have been completely cross-linked.

[Dottonedan]

Thanks guys,  I'm sure that these have all (not) had a hardener on them. They were regular production screens from a shop that just shut down one day without notice. Financial/investor legal stuff.  Then they auctioned off the stuff.  Some of them still have stencil images of Disney art on them.  Hey, probably a collectors item  on ebay.

[Frog]

As others have said, that unless hardened with a "permanent" hardener, (or grossly underexposes and previously cleaned with Xylene) you may be good to go.

Generally, the most aggressive hardeners are usually reserved for waterbased inks with emulsions not necessarily designed exclusively for waterbased inks.
Even with the extensive pre-print work for which we catalogued screens, and made thousands of impressions, in the last place I worked, we never hardened our plastisol screens (on purpose).