squeegee flood vs flood bar

[ZooCity]

Complete opposite of opinion of Jon and JBLUE here: I print with a very hard fill on the manual, like printing in with the screen in the air basically.   A properly and completely filled screen decreases gain from the print stroke and provides ultimate consistency in ink deposit. 

In fact it's the only way I've ensured consistent results in a shop like mine where, at some times, there were  up to 4 different manual printers.  I want that print to look the same every job, no matter who's doing it.  A hard flood or "fill" achieves this by allowing the stencil thickness to regulate ink deposit and minimizing the variable of pressure and angle on the print stroke.

This topic interests me a lot as I've been brainstorming how best to achieve this on an auto.  I think hard fills on auto printing would solve so many of these print issues I read about on here with autos.   Talkin' bout plastisol here of course.  WB can be hard filled as well but the dynamics are completely different.  I do hard fill with some WB poster inks on the clamshell which sounds crazy but it works.

[Shanarchy]

I'm not sure it would help much with print stroke length. You still have to flood the image so your flood bar is going to determine your print stroke length. If you switch to a squeegee for flooding it will take away even more of your printable area. Many flood bars are bent so the flood is closer to the squeegee. This may not be true on all presses. If I use a squeegee to flood it will take away almost an inch or more. The winged flood bars from Action are not as bent as the original floods on my press so they also take away from my print stroke. (Sorry to hear your lacking on stroke length. I have plenty of length  )

Brain blunder....you are absolutely correct on the flood bar. A 0 degree angle Dr J would actually work against me for maxing print stroke.

[Screened Gear]

Zoo, I am not saying hard floods don't work. Jblue also hard floods, if I remember correctly. Hard flooding to a point is good. Fill is what your going for. Over fill is a problem. If you can't fill with a normal flood bar then its not the flood bar that is failing. I maybe the only one that prints with a soft flood. I like to cover the design with 1/18 or more ink. Am I doing it wrong? No. I am doing it the way that works for me.  If you have a ton of EOM you will need to do what ever you can to fill it. I have backed off my EOM. I am at about 10 percent now and my prints are all dialed in. There is a ton of ways to print on an auto and coming from a manual it took me a long time to get dialed in. I got a few ways to work like using high EOM, printing with better inks, using special squeegees and even flashing every color. The truth is tons of ways will work but I wanted to print the same way I did on my manual.

[ScreenFoo]

I'm not sure it would help much with print stroke length. You still have to flood the image so your flood bar is going to determine your print stroke length. If you switch to a squeegee for flooding it will take away even more of your printable area. Many flood bars are bent so the flood is closer to the squeegee. This may not be true on all presses. If I use a squeegee to flood it will take away almost an inch or more. The winged flood bars from Action are not as bent as the original floods on my press so they also take away from my print stroke. (Sorry to hear your lacking on stroke length. I have plenty of length  )

Brain blunder....you are absolutely correct on the flood bar. A 0 degree angle Dr J would actually work against me for maxing print stroke.

I don't think it wouldn't work against you going 0 degrees--more angle equals more space between the flood and print edges and could equal less printable area--of course the squeegee angle won't change how long the stroke is, but at 0 tilting the flood forward and making the bead smaller (if you can on a Horizon) and shortening the ink well could add an inch or two.  Not that it's any fun to run that way.

[Shanarchy]

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 at 0 tilting the flood forward and making the bead smaller (if you can on a Horizon) and shortening the ink well could add an inch or two.  Not that it's any fun to run that way.
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That would be the thought. I have a couple of double bevels squeegees coming in. Most of my print runs are relatively small (50-100 pieces). My bigger orders range between 200-300 pieces. So on my typical orders shortening the ink bead shouldn't be too bad. I'm going to play around with that and see how it works for me.

[alan802]

I've been using the Dr J for a while now. I use them all the time for our one hits on darks.  The squeegee as a flood bar fills the stencil better and you can see a difference in ink deposit between a metal flood bar and squeegee.  The other day when I was asking what would be the best substrate to print on to test ink deposit thickness was to measrure those differences between different flood bars, squeegees and also mesh counts.  Hopefully I'll get a chance to test and measure soon.

A couple of questions....

Do you think putting a normal squeegee in place off my flood bar would give me any advantages? Or would it be a poor trial to see if the Dr J's would be worth it?

If someone was to take a 16" Dr J or Smilin Jack and trim either a half inch or an inch off both sides, do you think it would alter the performance being that it would change the profile of the smile cut?

Do you think the advantage to a squeegee base/Dr J flood bar is only worth it for white and high opacity inks? Or do you think you would get a noticeable benefit even using them on wow and general purpose inks?

You can use a normal blade to try it out.  I see what Jon and Blue are saying but running a typical floodbar over the top of an image and not doing a hard flood simply does not "prime" or load the stencil with enough ink.  The purpose of flooding hard is to prime the pump so to speak and they are right in that there will be dot gain on certain types of printing, that's why we wouldn't use the Dr J on a sim process job or something that doesn't need a thicker ink deposit.

Another reason we fill the stencil by using a hard flood is it reduces the amount of print pressure we need to shear the ink, by a good margin, say 20% on average.

It will alter the performance but probably not noticeably especially if using it as a fill blade.  I wouldn't use the Dr J or any squeegee to fill with on any top colors or general printing on light garments because it will affect the WOW aspect by probably depositing too much ink.  But, say you are not getting enough ink down and you can see the shirt through the print with one stroke, most people will double stroke, well, you could fill the stencil better however you choose and get a better ink deposit and still stay with one stroke.  If that job is a multi color with the need to print WOW then you'll have to be careful and use WOW inks and meter the ink deposit accordingly to keep the buildup to a minimum.

My question is why do you need to flood that much ink? Using a squeegee is going to have dot gain galore if you are using it to make contact with the screen.

You could possibly over fill the stencil and have dot gain galore but we haven't run across this problem.  The only time we are using the Dr J to fill with is when I'm shooting for a one hit white or other color on darks.  For that purpose, a heavy/hard fill is sometimes the missing 5-10% ink deposit that we are needing.  I can't say for sure just how much more ink gets deposited using a Dr J over a regular fill blade but I've got prints of both through the same screen and settings and you can tell by eye there is a difference.  If I can ever stop working 15 hour days trying to do shipping/receiving and still run the screen printing department I will do some experimenting and measure the results.