Am I Doing This Right?

[mimosatexas]

I push for plastisol, but have also never gotten great penetration with a push stroke when using waterbased inks.  Always have had to use a pull stroke (which sucks).

[blue moon]

When pulling, drop your sqeegee so its almost parrallel with the shirt. To get the angles right it needs to be very low to duplicate yhe pulling setup.
Pierre

[ZooCity]

When printing dc manually I have the handle more perpendicular to the screen and then use downward pressure to bend the blade during the print stroke for the right effective angle.  Hence the 60d/soft and flexible blade and the sore upper body. 

What I found most difficult about manually printing dc ink was getting the consistency of penetration across the image area that you get on an auto.  Fatigue sets in quickly with print runs like this, single strokes have to be perfect and double strokes can easily be too much.   It'll build your manual print skills though.

[nobrainsd]

Nice of Frog to have good things to say about me I'm not printing full time anymore, more of a hobby thing. Still lurking here on the forum though!

Getting a really bright white like a plastisol print is definitely difficult on a manual printer using discharge. I have had success, but it is a pain. I tended to shoot for a slightly less bright white with the Magna no zfs discharge inks I use. But I did get some pretty good prints with it. One thing that helped was that I generally do very detailed work at higher mesh counts (230). So I can get away with a second hit on my discharge whites. That was a big help. I also used a bit of water in my mix as a penetrant. That helps a lot. A big thing for me was going to s mesh (thanks to JBLUE for the advice). Like zoocity said it is hard to get consistent penetration across the large images I do with a manual. Be sure to watch for the weak hand side getting light!

I don't push. Too many years pulling has me trained that way. I do use a medium durometer squeege. Just straight one durometer. Don't know if that's the best. But I can get a good deposition with it on the manual and see the blade bend which helps me judge the pressure.

For me, it's the s mesh and using a higher mesh count so I can hit it twice.

Not discharge, but my latest hydrofoiling T . WB eight color indexed print. Thanks to all who helped me over the years.

[lancasterprinthouse]

yeah it's a bear on the manual. 60d blade and body racking pull strokes.

You may have hit on another issue.  I have been using 70/90/70 blades and have recently decided to switch back to straight 70.  You think 60 works better on discharge?

60 is way better for discharge. I didn?t know what I was missing until I changed some squeegees over to 60


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[screenxpress]

Thanks

[3Deep]

I still use our manual press from time to time and I use both push and pull, I will push a job when I'm dealing with high details or haftones because it lays down less ink and i can control my angle better, but when I do spot colors or single colors I pull because it lays down more ink and i can lay the print angle down lower and get more ink down in one stroke sometimes.