"He who marches out of step hears another drum." ~ Ken Kesey
* Some people seem fixated on fluoro units even in the presence of evidence that single point is superior.
Roger believes in the single point enough to encourage DIY halogen. He seems to shy away from MH as I seem to remember him saying that they were hard to obtain (and of course would generally require a shutter of some sort, further complicating the project).There are many fluorescent units that perform well enough to produce award winning shirts and great selling retail pre-prints. The shop I used to work at can attest to this.A fluorescent with a vacuum may easily outperform a single point MH without.One reason that multi-tube units are popular with DIY, is that the cabinet part is much easier to build and also they are more compact to fit on an existing table rather than requiring space as a stand-alone.
There are some powerful fluoro boxes come to think of it, there is one at screwball press that supposedly will get perfect stencils in ten seconds with QX-1.
For some reason I thought that Roger recommended MH. I would agree that MH is definitely more expensive, but shouldn't be hard to obtain. At least not around here, there are at least five hydroponic stores within ~30 minutes of my house in the woods. People around here sure do like tomatoes in the winter, lol. I built my box with a shutter, very crude, but it worked. It was just a sheet of plywood in a slot in the box over the lamp.
About the glisten method, I re read the article and I am not sure I have it right. Does this mean that I should coat the print side until the squeegee side glistens and then one or two coats from the squeegee side?
This discussion has me wondering how I would do with a flouro exposure unit. I feel like I would struggle since all I've ever used was a 10K watt metal halide. I know lot's of you have perfected your screen making with flouro exposure units and probably make as good a stencil as we do with our unit, and I applaud that. One thing I'm grateful for is having had the stencil making process made very easy for us.