What have you printed lately?

[bulldog]

Danny...if I remember right you were trying some of that simplex dc for base. Is that what you're still using?

[3Deep]

Danny even though your prints are banging I can see them being a little heavy using a plastisol base white, so yes using a DC base will really help in that area also your halftones will lay down better but heck you know all this your good

darryl

[Orion]

Tony, figured I'd let you know that I'm now running over 75% of my sim process jobs with a discharge underbase!!! I will come right out and say that our printing is BETTER with the discharge underbase and a big reason I have been pushing myself to do discharge is you..... Slowly I'm doing more and more with discharge/waterbase products and thats probably mostly because of you so thanks for that! LOL

I'm a firm believer that discharge base gives us a better print then plastisol base 100%

Same here...

[mimosatexas]

Printed 250 of these today.  Most of the stuff I print is pretty basic, but I finally had somewhat free reign on a design and I think the results came out pretty great.  I specifically wanted something a bit challenging.

Due to budget I was limited to 4 screens: white underbase on 225S two strokes (print and clearing, single stroke on all others.), flo green and flo blue, both on 280 mesh, and top white also on 225S.  Everything printed manually with triple duro's.  Everything 55lpi and 22.5 degrees.  Only a few dots missing on the low end, but I'm actually really happy with how everything came out.  Colors were mostly determined by the client.

There is a little bit of an issue with the opacity of the green ink, and it lost some of the tonal range as a result.  I actually have a small sample of a One Stoke flo that would have been ideal, but couldn't get a gallon quickly enough.  The crappy cell phone photo makes it look worse than it is in person, and the photo is kind of washed out so it's hard to see how awesome the smoke and the glows around the edges came out in person.  Art was finalized last night and they are due Monday, so I had to sep it myself this morning.  I tried running it through sep studio, but it doesn't like being limited to so few colors on stuff like this.  I'm moderately happy with the seps, but a pro could have made the fire a lot more dynamic I think.  I had some trouble keeping the smoke separate and maintaining the tones within the green honestly.  Ideally it would have had two blues and two greens.

[tonypep]

Nice print Mimo especially where the green falls off the underbase.

[mimosatexas]

Thanks tony.  I'm going to get a better photo today, that one is really terrible.

[bulldog]

It's got some nice pop to it!

[sqslabs]

Nice work man, I'd be scared to even attempt that on a manual. 

[SERJ]

Printed using MagnaPrint® Discharge AB AW System 120T Mesh

[tonypep]

Tony, figured I'd let you know that I'm now running over 75% of my sim process jobs with a discharge underbase!!! I will come right out and say that our printing is BETTER with the discharge underbase and a big reason I have been pushing myself to do discharge is you..... Slowly I'm doing more and more with discharge/waterbase products and thats probably mostly because of you so thanks for that! LOL

I'm a firm believer that discharge base gives us a better print then plastisol base 100%

Same here...

While not quite as good as pure DC color, the DC Base is an excellent consideration. The yield is crisper definition, resolution, and hand of course. That said once you master pure DC color, well...most never look back. Look at what The Mountain does.

[jvanick]

I wish we could do more discharge here... with printing for church events, 5ks and other events where the shirts are given out and most likely worn same day, I still am really worried about the whole wash-first deal.

That said, when we can, we prefer to do discharge, especially sim process discharge... prints faster, better, easier, and cleans up REALLY easilly.  And the gradient blends look better, which is a huge win in my book.

[ScreenPrinter123]

Tony, figured I'd let you know that I'm now running over 75% of my sim process jobs with a discharge underbase!!! I will come right out and say that our printing is BETTER with the discharge underbase and a big reason I have been pushing myself to do discharge is you..... Slowly I'm doing more and more with discharge/waterbase products and thats probably mostly because of you so thanks for that! LOL

I'm a firm believer that discharge base gives us a better print then plastisol base 100%

Same here...

While not quite as good as pure DC color, the DC Base is an excellent consideration. The yield is crisper definition, resolution, and hand of course. That said once you master pure DC color, well...most never look back. Look at what The Mountain does.

Danny (and Tony),

So... we run our sim process jobs on 330-S mesh (and some times 270-T) mesh.  From a recent post by you, Danny, it seems your runs that you're posting are somewhere in the 500-1,000 piece range?  I would enjoy running DC base and plastisol top on our sim process jobs, as I even think you can get away with more colors because of possible needing less cool downs (because ink isn't on top of a plastisol white), but a few questions:

(1) While on smaller runs of 500 pieces I don't see this posing an issue, my biggest concern for us on longer runs (for us, like 6k pieces), is the halftones clogging up.  And, well, you won't know until WELL after you're screwed at the end of the dryer.  So, what's the safeguard for this?  Also, getting through 6k pieces in one day for 2 guys on 20" tall prints isn't going to happen here.  So there's also the cleaning out the screen and hope you got all the small dots cleaned out aspect for the next day's run of printing. 

(2) Danny, have you noticed any difference in build up on the bottom of screens with a plastisol base and a dc base on your sim process jobs?

(3) What about vibrance in print?  At the end of a 6 color sim process job that we ran with a plastisol base, I did a test print with a DC base and the colors were a bit more more muted and the hand was not so noticeably different (so we would've lost a lot more in vibrancy than we would've gained in "hand") -- but we're also running our plastisol base through 330.  Do you find your artist needs to accommodate for the top color seps when you're running DC base as opposed to plastisol base?

(4) Top Colors: Do you notice a difference in speed of running the squeegee?  We're running our top plastisol colors at 14"-25" per second on top of a plastisol white base.  Do you find any need to slow down your squeegees to improve opacity, since you're effectively printing on the shirt itself with the DC base? 

(5) Base Print: What's the speed of your squeegee for your base with plastisol in comparison to that of discharge?  Are you double stroking the discharge base screen like you've mentioned you do sometimes on your base with plastisol?  That would kill our speed in getting the job done if we had to double stroke on our press for 6k pieces.

Thanks for your input.

[alan802]

I'd be interested in hearing how to keep the DC base from drying in the screen with those higher mesh counts.  I'm having trouble keeping the mesh open above 225's with underbasing with DC and plastisol on top...sim process stuff.  I've done a few DC base plastisol top sim process but if I go higher on the mesh counts it dries in badly. 

[mimosatexas]

I can keep the 225S running pretty well for DC underbase with higher color counts on mid-size manual runs of 100-150, but 300S dries up way to quick.  I really wish they would make a 250-280S

[Gilligan]

I really wish they would make a 250-280S

I  hear ya there!

Al B.  Get em on it!