until we got a meter and really knew what was going on, we were getting good to great results out of screens with 13-15N... on single color, non-tight registration, dark ink on light, or jobs with .5pt of choke, we still can get good results out of them... with thick ink, or tight registration, I prefer to have high tension screens. Honestly, I can't tell the difference of 5N when the screen is above say 20N, and the finger test works just fine.
As we now have tighter deadlines, more jobs and more setups per day tho, I really finally understand why you want to track stuff like this... Now that we have consistency across the board, I'm able to take a screen and put it on press and many times not even have to run a test print before we start a run... heck, I don't even remember the last time we touched print speed or print angle on head 1 of our press... with inconsistent tension on our screens, it wasn't uncommon to have to mess with the print speed and/or angle on every job.
