Spatulas Which to use?

[Maxie]

i want to replace my spatulas.
Which are best to use?
Plastic, stainless steel?
Who sells them?

[Denis Kolar]

I have a bunch of these
https://www.katom.com/080-TOS7.html

[farmboygraphics]

As an alternative we use paint mixers. They do double duty, mix and you can also scoop a pretty good amount of ink out of the bucket. About $4 at Lowes. Every ink bucket has one in it and that's where they stay. We use cut down chipboard to get the ink back out of the screens.

[willy35]

I use these one, got them on http://hbshengda.en.alibaba.com/ ,  from China, many different size and cheap.

[jvanick]

we use these:

http://www.webstaurantstore.com/tablecraft-4212-12-icing-spatula/8084212.html

[ericheartsu]

we use these:

http://www.webstaurantstore.com/tablecraft-4212-12-icing-spatula/8084212.html

we use something really similar. ours has a black (cooler) handle.

[IntegrityShirts]

I'm a cheap bastard and use these:http://www.waresdirect.com/products/Restaurant-Supply/Johnson-Rose-/Offset-Spatula483479

Only broken 1 so far out of about 50.

[Ryan]

Do any of these have a tapered blade thickness wise? thick near the handle and get thinner at the end? I bought some from a place online and got them this way which I really like as they are really flexible and clean ink out of screens really well, but the last time I ordered them, they weren't tapered anymore and I got the run around about how they don't determine how they get them. Just curious as I want to find the tapered ones again. FYI I bought them as icing spatulas.
Thanks

[blue moon]

Maxie,

look into the clean up cards. Yes, they are disposable, but no cleanup needed, they are always right where you need them and will not scratch or damage your mesh.

pierre

p.s. my offer stands, you can buy stuff and ship it to us for staging, then send one bigger shipment to Israel.

[Gilligan]

Yes, we don't let ANYTHING but cleanup cards/business cards touch our (S-)mesh.  Other things were leaving scratches and that wasn't working for us.  Now we use spatulas in the bucket but then scrape them off with cards into the screens.

[Parker 1]

Yes, we don't let ANYTHING but cleanup cards/business cards touch our (S-)mesh.  Other things were leaving scratches and that wasn't working for us.  Now we use spatulas in the bucket but then scrape them off with cards into the screens.

Same here. 

Also at the end of the day we run the cards through the dryer and are able to reuse them. 

[Racer Tees]

Cake spatulas from Walmart in my quarts. $4.50 ea.
Goop scoops in my gallons.

My screen guy gave me this slick aluminum scoop/cleanup tool.  It gets in the corners of bucket really good, but I can't get the hang of teardown with it.

Oh yea, cleanup cards are sweet and cheap.

[alan802]

You guys using the 1" wide spatulas, we have them and use them to mix/stir inks, but I like the wider goop scoops for putting ink in and out of the screens (especially during teardown when a goop scoop can get the entire load of ink out of the screen with 3 scoops), but do you guys just use 3 to 4 scoops to get enough ink in the screens or do you have a trick to getting enough ink on them to fill an auto screen in one scoop?  I like the old goop scoops that weren't flimsy and cheaply made, but they are getting harder to find.  The last couple rounds of goop scoops I bought won't even hold a full scoop of plastisol ink without bending over or breaking, they're pathetic.  We've got about 40 goop scoops that 20 of them stay in the most used ink colors and the others are cleaned regularly.  We used the cleanup cards for the 1st few years but we were burning through them like crazy and they were laying all over the place and I decided the goop scoops were cheap enough and the good ones literally last forever.  I may take another look at the cleanup cards.

[alan802]

Where are you guys buying the cleanup cards?

[Gilligan]

Alan, we started seeing scratches in our S-Mesh with any sort of scoops... we just avoid them completely.

Terry uses the clean up cards, I'm cheap so I use unwanted/misprinted business cards as we have plenty around.  It takes a few scoops to get it out, but it's far less time than remeshing a screen down the road.