Discharge Nation - discharge screen printing blog

Screenprinted Vacord holiday cards

So this year I decided to send out some Vacord “season’s greetings” cards. I went through my records and picked out good customers and clients, anyone with whom I enjoyed working or who gave a sizable order, and I sent cards to these people, along with my distributor, the people at EZ Squeegee, and my parents and sister. I felt it was a nice thing to do and hopefully it will encourage those people to come back next year for more orders.

I had printed cardboard before, and posterboard as well as sticker paper, but never cardstock like this.  I used two 305mesh screens. Remember that when printing paper, you don’t want to lay down much ink at all since it won’t be absorbed like it will with apparel, and when doing fine text like this, you should use a high mesh anyway. I chose this font because it didn’t have any serfis, which would be a nightmare at this minutia.  The inks are Matsui RC Pantone Green and Rubine Red.  I registered the films then took one sheet of the cardstock and lined it up on the platen to match the stencil, then marked the platen so that I could load the rest of the sheets.  I had made the screens so that a set of four would be printed at a time.

Business is extremely slow right now. I have to get more active and pursue work since it isn’t coming to me like it used to.  This economy is awful and custom shirts aren’t a necessity, so I’m going to have to start calling people and convincing them that they need my services. It doesn’t sound fun and I’m not looking forward to it, but I’ve got to do something to survive.  I’m taking advantage of this slow period and working on xmas presents, screen printed shirts and sweatshirts for the family. I’ll post about those prints but not until after the gifts are received.

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A 3color this week and weird exposure problem

I did 20 of those this week.  Black 2001 American Apparel with a red-pigmented discharge through a 180, discharge-white through a 160 and a grey mixed from Matsui 301 trans white, opaque white, and spot black through a 160.  The red started to misbehave and not lay down cleanly towards the end. The customer is going to order more, and I’ll do it through a 160 next time, which may keep it from misbehaving but could also lead to bleeding in the time that the other colors are being printed. At first I was doing red then white, flash, then grey/flash/grey, but did most of it it red, spin, white, flash, grey/flash/grey.

They came out fine, and the customer was very happy, which is the most important thing. This print illustrates some problem I’m having with burning low mesh screens that have to butt register. See the grey and the white, such as the “OH” in the text? They don’t butt register perfectly, but the films do. There is something going on during the burning process that is making the designs burn a tiny bit smaller than the films, which prevented this from butting properly, leaving a thin gap where none should be.  Monday I need to do some test burns and try to figure out what the problem is. Dennis at Westix who sold me my exposure unit, a HIX tt180 table top vacuum unit, said my burn time was probably too long and light was sneaking around the black of the film, so I reduced burn time from 6 minutes to 4 minutes for white mesh and I will lower it even further during my experiments.

This week I also did about 475 discharge-white prints.  Next week I need to do a tight 4color on white shirts, so I need to resolve any burning issues ASAP.

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Positives and negatives of discharge printing

A while ago someone from Columbia emailed and asked about the positives and negatives of printing with discharge inks. I’ll go over some of them here.

Positives:

• Cool effects. This is why most people seek out discharge printing. Virtually no hand after the first wash, you can see the weave of the shirt, and the print becomes part of the shirt. Those are the main “cool” factors involved.
• Quick to print. It’s just one layer so you can print it rapidly. With a 1color discharge, I can print 90 to 120 an hour, and I’m not even that fast compared to other pros.
• Wet-on-wet ability. Printing “wet-on-wet” is when you can print multiple colors without flashing between them. That makes printing faster than if you were doing multiple spot colors and had to flash while printing. If you have a 3 color discharge print, say red, green and white-pigmented, you would print the red, spin to the green screen and print that, then do the white-discharge print, pull it off your press and put it on the conveyor belt. I did a 6 color discharge once, and I printed each shirt in about 45 seconds.
• Profitability. It’s a special service, discharge printing, and becoming in higher demand, so you can charge more for it. A printer can make maybe one or two dollars more per print of a straight discharge than a normal one color print.
• Bright colors on darks. The best way to get a bright color on a dark shirt with waterbased printing.

Negatives:

• Difficult to mix colors. It’s a real PITA to try to pigment it. I’ll mix up some straight discharge, add pigment, test print it and see how that comes out, add more pigment, test print again, add more, and on and on.
• Can’t do a whole lot of detail. It clogs, so you have to use a lower mesh count screen. I find 156mesh ideal.
• Bleeds. It’ll clog a screen, but it’s also a fairly thin ink, so if you are running it through a 110 or 123, it will drip through the screen if you walk away. Even with a 156 you really shouldn’t stop printing very long.
• Doesn’t work on all garments and colors. Discharge will give some funky results on certain shirt colors, and a lot of garments and brands just don’t discharge well. If a shirt doesn’t discharge very well, your colors will be darker than you want.
• Short shelf life. You can’t leave it on your shelf for more than a few hours. It’ll keep in the fridge for a while, but not indefinitely so it ends up being wasteful when you have to toss it. I always end up mixing more than I need but it’s better than running out of it, especially if it’s pigmented, during a print run.

That’s all I can think of right now. Happy printing!

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Vacord has a Twitter now

I always thought that Twitter was dumb, but I was reading an article in Wired magazine that made Twittering sound like a good idea. I started one as a creative outlet, just to be silly, then a friend with whom I was having coffee said that I should use it as a Vacord Twitter. I said Nahh… but we talked about it further, and I decided that I could indeed use it, to talk about what I’m doing, print-wise, say that I have new blog posts, and link to pictures of what’s going on. Twitter is basically micro-blogging. And it’s not that bad.

If you’d like to follow my work via Twitter, check out Vacord Screen Printing’s Twitter.

“The doors are always open.”

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Fixing a print after the run is completed

A couple of weeks ago I did some really cool shirts for a soccer team in New York City. They were Alternative Apparel blue Ocean Wash shirts, and I printed them with Matsui’s fantastic Metallic Binder (silver) ink, straight discharge, and red-pigmented discharge. But there was lack of communication from the customer and I left off part of the design. Luckily I was able to fix the shirts. She shipped them back to me. What happened was that half the shirts were to have one team name in straight discharge and the other in red, and the other half the opposite, but she wasn’t clear that all shirts were supposed to have both names. It was pretty easy to fix tho, I just took the shirts and printed the missing name. This was possible because the names weren’t inside the main design, so there was some wiggle room.

On this shirt “Gotham Argo” was added on the bottom left. There was considerable float in this second printing, but since it was straight discharge, which is thin and clear on the screen, I was able to see the previous print through the screen so that I didn’t accidently print the name too high or too low. My main concern was printing it too high and getting it into the main print. The float of the first print and simply the variability in loading the shirts on press made it a little tricky, but overall it was a success, definitely.

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Last week’s work

The current economic situation is definitely affecting my business. Last week I kept busy because I had a lot of contract work to do. It was all completed a week ago and now I have pretty much nothing to do. I did only one small order this week. I have a couple of open orders currently and hopefully they will convert to real orders by next week. It’s rough. I am not getting nearly as many phone calls and emails as usual. Hopefully things will turn around soon!

Anyway, here are some pictures of what I did last week.

Shirts for a math club in Massachusetts. If you don’t get it, i is the representation of an imaginary number, which has a value that cannot be known.

Shirts for a local kickball team.

I did a lot of different designs for a clothing line that I work for, New California Co. These are all on American Apparel 2001 t-shirts unless otherwise specified.

White pigmented discharge on Army.

Kelly Green shirts with a gray and straight discharge. Note the texture of the discharge area. This is actually American Apparel BB401, which is a 50/50  blend and remember that only the cotton discharges in a blend.

Matsui spot black and a red that I mixed from the 301 series.

Black on Army 2001.

The above design but obviously done as a two color. Both colors through a 230 mesh to avoid bleeding. This is Matsui Reflex Blue and Union Aerotex Bright Red. I love the color of that red, but it stains mesh really badly and has a lousy viscosity. I wish Matsui made a bright red ready for use!

I liked how this one turned out a lot.  These are Galaxy AA BB401 shirts with a dark blue and discharge white.

Another version of the “Hands” design. Same grey as earlier, but with a yellow discharge on Cranberry 2001 shirts.

This looks like grey ink, but it’s actually straight discharge on a 50/50 shirt. I can’t remember the name of the shirt color, but it’s one of those blues (this might be Royal) which discharges as a grey for some reason. I have no idea why this happens exactly, why the dye actually darkens. Very interesting.

Yellow discharge on black 2001. Mixing discharge colors is a pain in the butt, yellow included. I kept getting too light of a yellow, and at first got too dark, too goldish, of a yellow.  See a previous post on having a TEST screen for mixing colors.  With discharge, you have to mix, test print and put through the oven to see what you actually get, mix more, test print again, and so on until you get something satisfactory. Matsui should sell premixed colors of discharge, binders with pigments in them already for standard colors, and the printer would just add the powder agent to activate the discharge. I’d buy that.

The next step for the clothing line is to take these pictures and put them on the site and launch. Hopefully they will sell quickly so that I’ll need to make more shirts.

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Simple “green” tips

Everyone’s talking green lately, which is good. How green are your printing practices? I’m not referring to the argument of which is more environmentally friendly, plastisol or waterbased inks, but other things in your shop, like your use of disposable items. I’ll just talk about a couple small changes I’ve made.

Last year when I moved into my current space, I was using paper towels a lot. If my hands got ink on them, paper towel. If I washed my hands and needed to dry them, paper towel. Oops is that ink on the mixing table? You get the idea. I stopped using paper towels for common tasks. I have an old dud shirt hanging off my ink shelf by my press, and if I get ink on my hands, I just wipe it off onto the shirt. I’m only using waterbased, so the inks do dry on the shirt eventually. I also keep a couple of old shirts by the sink that I use to dry my hands. I clean up ink spills with old misprint/test/dud shirts. I’ve yet to figure out just what I’m going to do with hundreds of dud shirts, but we’ll cross that bridge later, and in the meantime, they can make good rags.

I used to use plastic spoons to mix inks, stir inks, scoop inks onto screens, and as a result, threw away tons of spoons.  Then I found out about goop scoops, and they are pretty great (get the white kind with the bucket slot in them, so you can hang them inside your gallon tubs). I have a dozen, and I use them for everything I used spoons for, scooping mixing stirring, but they are reusable, just clean them off.

Being green can save you money when you reduce waste.  Review your use of power as well. I try not to run my oven all day, and if I know I’m going to have a delay between print runs, I’ll go ahead and turn the thermostat all the way down on the control panel, so it’s not heating for no reason. It will retain heat, and then I can quickly bring it back up to curing temperature when I’m printing again.

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Prints the week of October 21st

This week was very nice. The first half of the month was awful. I speculate that the economic uncertainty caused people to hold tightly on their money and not order things like custom shirts, but once the uncertainty continued but people realized it’s not vastly changing their lives, they decided that they could indeed order shirts. 90% of my business this month was done in just this past week. I did seven custom orders and some contract work. I have a lot more of the contract printing to do next week.

I printed 15 shirts for my landlord, and he is giving them to a rowing club or team. Not sure the details but it’s always good to do an order in partial trade for shop rent! These were white-pigmented discharge on navy Gildan g200.

I have a client who is starting an eco-fabulous clothing line. She’s great as it’s always pretty straightforward printing, on a continuous basis, and she’s super nice. I did prints on silk, business cards basically, on square foot pieces of fabric, and she’ll cut them up. Printing on silk isn’t really different than cotton. Due to the high detail of the design, very small text, I printed through a 305 mesh screen.

The trickiest part is lining up each sheet on my platen. I load the first one and make it line up with the screen, then mark the edges so I have a guide to place the following pieces.

I also printed text over a peace sign print on some shirts for her. I am sure the peace sign was printed through a screen, but I didn’t do it. The texture of the peace print gave a little trouble, as did the float of that print relative to each garment, but overall they came out fine.

A repeat customer in California ordered shirts for an ultimate Frisbee team:

Shirts for what I assume is dental students (my favorite part is that someone’s last name is Slaughter):

Shirts for the band Whales and Cops:

I did some complicated shirts for a soccer team in NYC. Blue Ocean Washed Alternative Apparel shirts with straight discharge, red-pigmented discharge, and silver ink, all Matsui inks. This will be October print of the month, I’m sure.

Variable color pigmented discharge print:

Here’s my dog, Vincent “Black Shadow” Martinez, eternal employee of the month:

What a handsome devil!

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Picking boogers

Hey, gross, what? I heard the term “booger” at an ISS show. A booger is a little piece of lint or fuzz or tiny shirt thread that gets stuck on the bottom of your screen, in the open stencil area. They’re bad because they will leave a little spot in your print, where the booger blocks ink from being laid down. They seem to most frequently occur to me when I’m doing discharge and white-discharge printing. With white-discharge, it’s easy to see it in the print, but with straight discharge you would have to either see the booger itself actually blocking the stencil or catch the tiny misprint on oven exit.

So you’ve got a booger, how do you pick it out? If you use your nails or fingertips, you can smear ink from the open stencil (where ink should be) to the coated parts of the stencil, and if you do that then your next print will have an ink smudge. I take a little bit of masking tape, the same I use to tape off screens, and wrap it around a fingertip, and carefully just touch the booger with the tape and it’ll remove it. A little practice and you will rarely cause any smudging.

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Squeegee Durometer and Blade Edges

What the hell is squeegee durometer? Blade stiffness!

Squeegees have two parts basically; the handle, which is wooden or metal of some sort, and the blade, which is a rubber-like substance with varying degrees of flex. You’ll have to forgive me here, as I don’t know exactly what the blades are made out of. I’d say on some of the cheap squeegees it is rubber, but on the nicer ones, it is obviously not rubber. But the blade is what applies the ink, and the durometer is the stiffness of the blade.

Why does the stiffness of the blade matter? Well, my friend, the amount of ink laid down in a pass of the squeegee has a ton to do with the blade. In fact, it’s mostly the blade and the screen mesh that determines how much ink is laid down, other than the actual physical action of the screen printer himself (or the automatic machine).

Basically, a stiffer blade lays down less ink, and a blade with more flex lays down more ink. The stiffness is durometer, and low durometer is less stiff, and higher durometer is more stiff. I got 70 durometer EZ Squeegees, which is a standard stiffness, good for general applications. If you’re going to have just one blade stiffness, go with 70.  When I got more EZ Squeegees, I asked for 80 durometer. I hadn’t before had anything other than 70. If you’re doing high detail work with a non-opaque ink, you could benefit from a higher durometer squeegee. I was a bit silly and tried one of the 80 durometer squeegees with white discharge ink (Matsui’s “Discharge White”) and it just wasn’t laying down a good amount of ink. I won’t do that again. Actually, for laying down white ink, it would be cool to use a low durometer, like a 60, to lay down a lot of white ink, as long as the white ink isn’t too thin so that there would be bleeding issues. So many factors go into ink deposit amounts.   Isn’t screen printing fun? By the way, the thinness of the ink and its other liquid characteristics can be described as its “viscosity.” At your next cocktail party, say something like “I don’t care for Union Aerotex inks, as their viscosity is horrible and they stain mesh badly.”

Another factor in how much ink a squeegee will lay down is the edge of the blade. You want it to be sharp, generally. The only time you’d want a rounded blade would possibly be to lay down a lot of ink, as rounded lays down more ink, and sharper lays down less. I’ve never heard a professional printer recommend a rounded blade, sharp is always preferred. Sharp with a lower durometer is good if you’re trying to lay a thicker layer.

Happy printing.

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