"He who marches out of step hears another drum." ~ Ken Kesey
Maybe someone will come up with the squeege-flood with wings?
I've got some manual ones that I've tried a few times but I don't really like them. I can't say I honestly gave them much of a chance cause I don't print manually very often.
I've been using the Dr J for a while now. I use them all the time for our one hits on darks. The squeegee as a flood bar fills the stencil better and you can see a difference in ink deposit between a metal flood bar and squeegee. The other day when I was asking what would be the best substrate to print on to test ink deposit thickness was to measrure those differences between different flood bars, squeegees and also mesh counts. Hopefully I'll get a chance to test and measure soon.
My question is why do you need to flood that much ink? Using a squeegee is going to have dot gain galore if you are using it to make contact with the screen.
Quote from: JBLUE on January 29, 2013, 01:18:08 PMMy question is why do you need to flood that much ink? Using a squeegee is going to have dot gain galore if you are using it to make contact with the screen.I agree. If you have to do something like this your messed up somewhere else in the process. I haven't used the smile or the doctor so I am not trashing them but I understand the physics of the design. The cut makes a bending point. Depending on speed and pressure you create your print angle. This is why they go in at zero angle and they want you to run them fast. Since the bending point is lower on the blade then a standard blade (bending at the squeegee holder). This makes you get a sharper print angle with ink compression before the print. The ink compression is similar to printing with a push stroke. Depending on speed and pressure maybe a high print angle then possible with a normal set up. The blade only needs to bend a slight amount to get the angle. Now they say its an 80 duro or something like that. Well the 80 duro has a cut in it making it bend at that point more like a 40 duro since it is only bending half the mass of the blade. The 80 duro material can't clean the screen as well as a soft duro. I have a few blades that do something similar and they do work great. I am sure if you cut a 80 duro on a table saw you could get the same performance as one of these blades. I like the thinking but like everything in screen printing most of these special items are because people have something else not set right or need to compensate for something. Alan I am not talking about you. I know you use these type things to do what some say are impossible. If I saw this last year I would have bought one. I was having issues with ink lay down (not enough ink). It took me a while but I fixed that issue with finding the areas I was not adjusted properly.