Anyone that chooses to use racked rollers must not care too terribly much about anything. That's so easily fixed.
Mike, our setups increased due to less off contact needed and our statics that were around 15 newtons would shift bad with squeegee direction causing prints to be out of reg vertically. At the time we were using statics predominantly, we weren't using a regi system, just manually registering jobs. Depending on how loose the screen was the more adjustments we'd have to make with the screen. We would cheat during setups and lock the screen in place a few points higher knowing that the screen would shift downward with the squeegee. I have some illustrations on how the mesh reacts with differing off contact heights, I just need to figure out how to get them from keynote on the ipad to my photobucket account.
When using statics, we would give the art a little more "play", with traps/chokes and couldn't get away with butt registration. We overlapped most every color. I'm not saying all shops have to do this but I was getting tired of having to do 12 test prints on a 6 color butt regi job. That was normal during the static days, now if we have to do 3 test prints on a 6 color then I'm pissed. As with almost every variable, things are different from shop to shop, but I'm not embellishing anything when I say that so many problems and issues simply disappeared when we started using higher tension screens. I know that not everyone will see the results we got, some might even get better results, some could possibly not even be noticeable. If a shop is having a bunch of little issues that pop up on multicolored jobs then I'd say that they would be a great candidate for using higher tension. If a shop is seemingly running smoothly and things are great with low tension statics, then it would be very hard to convince them they need to do anything differently.
My best advice would be to try high tension if you are double stroking anything lower than a 230 mesh, not able to print wet on wet for at least 2 screens between flashes, not getting your top colors to pop with a single stroked underbase, if you cannot get an opaque white print on a black shirt by one stroke, flash, one stroke, want to achieve "one hit" prints. If it's taking you more than a few minutes per color to set up a job or having to do more than 3-4 test prints for every multi-colored job then you might be a candidate for high tension. I'm sure I'm forgetting some pretty obvious issues that can be eliminated by high tension but that's a good place to start.
