TSB
screen printing => Equipment => Topic started by: jvanick on July 05, 2016, 11:41:31 AM
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It's time to get an autocoater in the screen room ... for consistency, ease of coating, etc.
we'll be coating all the screens in one batch per day... our typical coating load is 30-40 screens per day during the busy season...
we're currently looking at the M&R UniKote and the Saati Pro-Coat.
I like the small foot print of the M&R, but I also like the idea of coating 2 screens at a time with the Pro-Coat.
Thoughts, comments on the 2 options?
The 'cleaning' of the coater troughs isn't a huge concern either as we can just put them in a bucket of water and rinse them after soaking for a while.
PS. Please note that "teach someone to coat" is not on the list. I'd rather have a machine to keep things consistent than try to train consistency and technique.
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UniKote - zero issues with ours and we were an early adopter of one...... Have not done enough research on the other units but our unikote has been one of the best machines we've invested in. I never was a fan of coating 2 screens at once as thats double the tools to clean and when your doing 200 or less screens a shift the unikote can bang them out super fast.
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We ended up with a very used, very old harlacher unit, but before we did, we were looking at the unikote and the saati coater.
Danny is right on the money with doing 2 screens at once.
Saati one is what we will go with when we upgrade, only because we use all saati chem and emulsion, and they've been amazing to work with.
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we don't have a full time screen room guy.. so I'd rather send them in and press the button 20 times in 30 minutes vs an hour... how long can it really take to clean 4 troughs? -- we clean 1 in a minute or so... so 4 minutes to clean 4 troughs vs double the time?
Feel free to correct my thought pattern tho.
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Our workflow has my pre press guy coating (2 at a time) and imaging/exposing at the same time. We actually leave the troughs on all day (covered) and use as we need to. We clean four troughs once a day, at the end of the day. Ten minutes TOPS. If pre press isn't coating, then he switches to imaging/exposing and developing and taping. Regardless of how you utilize a coating machine, the benefits are a lot more than just coating. Just my .02
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I prepped us for this earlier in the year and had it down to UniKote v. Grunig 404.
Grunig has a cleaner design and smarter trough but only coats one side at a time and requires some toggling of the holder when you flip the screen. It does not have digital presets, just some knobs to control all the variables. All electric. Costs a little less than the uni. If you can get away with coating from one side only and don't need to adjust from mesh to mesh it would be the best fit option. I fear that operators might forget where in the coating process they are at if you have to flip the screen manually, adjust settings, etc.
UniKote has a few design elements I'm not a fan of but I've seen Danny's and it checks out ok. Digital presets for some parts of the coating process, two sided coating which gives you more flexibility. The big advantage of the unikote is that an op can load it with one hand more or less, hit the button, walk away and the unit will coat it however you like 2/1, 2/2, etc. without a need to flip the screen or toggle dials around. When the op returns, if the screen has emulsion on it, it's done. For this reason I'd choose the unikote if you have more than one coating method and/or need to coat from both sides, as it eliminates operator error better than the Grunig.
The feedback I've received on dual screen coaters is to stick with single screen. The dual screen models have a rep for being hard to adjust to coat both screens accurately. The two big benefits of auto coating are perfect consistency and the ability to free up your screen tech- you don't want to loose the advantage of consistency or tie up your tech fiddling with the machine. Besides, the single screen models will be more than fast enough for most shops and save a good deal of footprint.
Hope this helps a bit.
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Saati. We had it at H&W. Anybody can use this thing. I mean anybody. We would do 1 rack of screens in about 10 minutes. For a really out of the box method PM me.
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Another vote for the uni-kote! Love ours.
Murphy