Discharge Nation - discharge screen printing blog

laser versus inkjet printers for producing films

On the t-shirt forums screen printing section, there is often the question of which is better, laser or inkjet printers for printing out films. The general consensus, which I agree with, is that a high-end inkjet printer is better. I have a refurbished Epson Stylus Color 3000 large-format inkjet printer for just printing films. I don’t use it for anything else now that I got a color laser printer for printing paper and proofs. The 3000 was expensive but it works well. It’s an old model, not produced for several years now, but considered a great printer for producing films. It cost about $900 but there are cheaper alternatives for laser printers for printing films. Check that t-shirt forums link and poke around and you can find some.

Anyway, the big difference between laser and inkjet printers is shrinkage of films. I used to use an HP laser printer, a cheap one that I got from newegg.com, a site that has good prices and most of the stuff ships from a warehouse in Jersey only about 15 miles from Philly so I generally get my orders quickly. They don’t seem to have it on their site anymore, so perhaps it’s no longer on the market. That HP laser printer worked well for printing films for the most part, but the issue with laser printers is that the heat from the printer can shrink the film. This isn’t a big deal if you’re doing a one-color print, but if you’re doing a multiple-color print it can be a nightmare, as the films may not match up because one or more may have shrunk while the others haven’t. If you burn your screens with the films, some shrunk some not, then registeration may be impossible. I used to print a few sheets of regular paper in an attempt to get the printer warmed up so that it would at least shrink uniformly. I remember having to print out a large design in two pieces and taping them together so that I could do a 12″x12″ print while being able to only print legal sized films. Sometimes the two films wouldn’t match up in the middle. The Epson 3000 was worth it, just to avoid problems like those.

With inkjet printers that are mediocre, not really good for printing films, one thing that I used to do and a lot of people do is to print two films of the same design and lay one on the other, lining them up perfectly. Having the two films together will make it a darker film, which is better for burning screens, because you want the design on the film as dark as possible to block the UV light. I’ve heard of people simply running the printed film through their printer again and it lines up correctly and gets a second layer of ink, which I can’t advocate but you are free to try. When I started out, I’d go to Kinko’s and get two films printed of each design, and tape them together. It worked but going to Kinko’s was a hassle, so I got the laser printer so I could just print out films at home. This was back when I worked in a laundry room with a very bare bones operation.

Be sure to get the correct films for either inkjet or laser printers. I used to buy laser film, also known as vellum, from Ryan Screen Supply. I now buy legal sized and 13″x19″ films from POSjet, which aren’t cheap, but they work very well and I get very dark prints on the films, partially because I have Epson software installed and I have the correct settings in Illustrator and Photoshop as well as GhostRIP, which all help make the films as dark as possible. From POSjet, a 100-pack of legal sized films is $65 and a 100-pack of 13″x19″ is $150. If you’re printing for profit, make sure your screen set up charge covers the cost of your film, as well as toner/ink and emulsion as well as reclaiming chemicals. My actual cost for setting up a screen including coating, film, and reclaiming, is probably $3 to $5. I only charge $10 to set up a screen, which is low for the industry. Sometimes with large and/or highly-profitable jobs I waive the screen set up charges.

Quick tip: Make sure your black in Photoshop or Illustrator is absolutely black, the darkest black you can get. Sometimes artwork will look black, but it’s not quite 100% darkest ebon black, and if you print a film that way and burn a screen, some UV light will penetrate the film and make washout difficult.

If you are using a laser printer, there is an easy way to make your films darker after you print them out. There is a product called Casey’s Ultra Black, which is a spray toner enhancer. “Blacker blacks in a can.” I used to buy it from Ryan Screen Supply but I can’t find it on their site now. You simply spray it on your film and then let it dry and the design gets darker. Be careful not to spray too much, and make sure your films are laying completely flat, or sometimes it will make the toner run.

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Recent work

Wednesday this week I did five orders, all straight discharge. Honestly I’d be happy to only do straight discharge prints the rest of the year, as they are interesting, quick, and profitable.

Here are some pictures of my recent work (the things that are not straight discharge were done last week):

100 shirts for the Philly band Mikingmihrab.  Done on Gildan g200/2000 black with Matsui white discharge through a 180 mesh count screen. 180 mesh is pushing it for white discharge, but I needed something higher to get as much detail as possible.  For longer white discharge print runs, I think 123 is best, if the detail is minimum.

Straight discharge through a 180 mesh screen onto brown 2001 and 2102 American Apparel shirts.  These shirts discharge really well. I would have used a lower mesh count if it weren’t for that one pretty thin line, which might not have come out in a 160 mesh and definitely not in a 123.   When thin lines don’t come out quickly for me, I just focus the stream of water onto the lines and they will slowly open up.  After doing this finesse, hold the screen up to the light so you can tell if you opened it all up and there are no small spots left in the line, as that would show up in the print. I did 20 of these.

My fiancé and I have a 1997 Ford Aerostar van, cargo style, with 270,000 miles on it. Quite an awesome vehicle.  I was going through the owner’s manual the other day and saw this line drawing of the van and knew instantly that I needed to put it on t-shirts, so I scanned the manual and edited it in photoshop and then printed some. The first day I printed a few using leftover brown-pigmented discharge, which had faded from the original tan color to more of a beige. I printed these two shirts with the beige discharge but the contrast was too low, so the next day I printed them again with red ink, which gives it this weird effect, which I like.

Here’s a print of that beige discharge, on a charcoal Gildan, which is a dark enough shirt to provide good contrast.

One thing about discharge printing is that I just don’t know how things will turn out sometimes, so sometimes I end up taking on an order, buying dozens or hundreds of shirts and just hope that they will discharge well. This was one of those cases, using Metro Blue Gildan shirts and not knowing how effectively it would discharge. It came out as a sort of light rust color. I printed one to test, cured it, and had to decide whether to go with it or not. Luckily the customer really likes them, so that’s good. I did 50 of these.

I did 10 more shirts for my friend’s band because they didn’t order enough XL the first time.  This is straight discharge on Military Green Gildan 100% cotton, which doesn’t discharge as well as a dark green like forest.  Having a discharge that isn’t completely effective can have a cool result, but it would prevent pigmented-discharge from working well to produce vibrant colors, and using discharge as an underbase for regular inks would be dampened as well.  Generally it seems that the darkest color shirts discharge the best, medium colors have mixed results, and light colors don’t discharge with enough contrast to make a good print visually.

I did 96 shirts front and back last week for a saloon in Maryland. The customer wanted a beige or light tan print with discharge so I spent sometime adding brown pigment, test printing, adding more, testing, until I finally got this color. The Matsui brown pigment seemed sort of weak, as I had to add more than I would have expected. Some pigments seem stronger than others, so you have to be careful not to add too much while you are tinkering to get the right color.

I originally did some of these a few weeks ago for my client in Pittsburgh, for his fraternity. They went over well so I made more for them. Straight discharge on Navy Gildan, which discharges very well, maybe the brightest of any Gildan color that I’ve tried.

Business has been very good lately. September was my best month ever.

Here’s a shot of straight discharge on a screen during the printing process. It’s a thin, goopy, white-looking ink. It’s pretty easy to work with, but it will bleed if you let it sit or you flood too much (too many flood strokes at a time) so I recommend a 156 mesh. Note the squeegee magically staying at the top of the raised screen. That’s one of Screen Technique’s EZ Squeegees, which are great. Look for the recent review on them. They come with clips that go on the screen frame and a magnet in the squeegee makes them stick. That feature along with the ergonomic design make them very good to work with as you can just do a flood stroke towards yourself then lay the squeegee down, lift your screen, remove the shirt, and work a little more quickly.

(NOTE: In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that I was not endorsed or influenced to write the full review or the above comments on EZ Squeegee, but after I posted the full review I was contacted by Screen Technique’s VP of Sales who wanted to ask me more questions and is sending me some free squeegees.)

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Gen4 hybrid ink disappoints, quest for the best red on black continues

So my buddy Phillip at Newell Graphics sent me a couple of samples of International Coatings’ new Gen4 hybrid ink, some of the white and some of the red. I needed to do red and white on black hoodies for a custom order, so I thought this would be an ideal test run with it. It’s a strange ink, handles like plastisol and gives print results like plastisol.  My initial testing came out well, when I did a few Vacord prints on Gildan black shirts:

That was the red on top of the white with a 2pixel trap. They came out perfectly and the ink behaved itself so I thought that perhaps my search for a bright red on black method might be over.

It was 28 hoodies. I began printing, doing a layer of the white, flashing, another layer of the white, flashing, then doing a layer of the red. I flashed for about 12 seconds, but it wasn’t really enough. I felt that technically it was enough for the next layer to put down, but it was still wet to the touch.  Some of the prints came out well and some had problems, such as not laying down a good layer of white. Printing on hoodies can be problematic anyway, and Phillip says I shouldn’t write off Gen4 yet.

It is indeed a nice solid, bright red on black, but as you can see, generally the red wasn’t completely solid because the white under it wasn’t completely solid. Look at the edge of white on the left side; a lot of the time the white wasn’t laying down a smooth, perfect layer, which affected the red on top of it and generally looked bad.  The customer was fine with it, luckily. It’s a tricky situation sometimes when you need to test out a new ink or process and the only real way to test it is with a print run, either a print run to make your own stuff which can be a real investment of time and money, or a gamble to do a custom order to test out the new method. This was a big order monetarily and if the hoodies hadn’t come out well enough and I had to do it over, I would have been out hundreds of dollars to replace the hoodies and getting the remaining balance of the order’s charge would have made me just barely break even. Customers are usually pretty forgiving and problems that really bother me, they just don’t care about.  People are often just really excited to get their custom shirts, to see their idea go from digital design to tangible product.

Other than the printing problems, it is a really nice red and white on black. It feels like plastisol, though, not at all like waterbased. It’s plastic-feeling and glossy. Gen4 is not like the best of both worlds, plastisol and waterbased, instead it’s like the worst of both worlds, clogging like a poor waterbased ink, having the gross hand of plastisol.

Those prints were the fronts of the hoodies. I had to do the backs too but I used up all my sample ink on the front so I had to do something else to print the backs. I had had success finally printing red on black with pigmented-discharge so I used white-pigmented and red-pigmented discharge to print the backs. I use Matsui waterbased discharge that I get from Westix.  The hoodies were a Gildan 90/10 blend so the discharge prints weren’t quite as bright as they would have been with a 100% cotton garment, but they still came out pretty well, just really different from the fronts:

That’s a good white, and a pretty good red, it just didn’t match the front, either with color, texture or hand. But again, the customer was nice and didn’t see it negatively.

So, it’s not perfect, but it looks like red-pigmented discharge may be the best way to do red on black for me, for now at least.

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Great tip. Got warped aluminum screens? Bend them flat!

I was talking to Matt at Westix Equipment & Supply, saying that a lot of my 20″x24″ aluminum frames, some of which I had gotten from Westix, were warped and did not lay flat.  This can cause problems during printing as the areas that are slightly higher will lay down less ink than the other areas, so you can get spot bleeding, uneven laydown of ink, et cetera. Matt told me how I could take my warped screens and make them lay flat, and by golly it worked! Here’s how you do it:

1. Take your warped screen and lay it down on the glass of your exposure unit or a table that is truly flat, noticing which corners (two opposite corners) stick up a little bit and allow it to the wobble on a flat surface.
2. Hold the screen by the corners selected in the above step and lean it against a table or the wall or something sturdy, putting one of the good corners against the ground and the other opposite good corner against the wall or the table or what-have-you, at an angle.
3. Press the warped corners. I tried pressing hard, but actually what seemed to work was little shoves of good force. Do a shove, lay it on the exposure unit, does it lay flat? If it didn’t lay flat, I did another shove of the warped corners, until it did lay flat.

That’s it! Fantastic, huh? Probably one third or maybe even half of my screens seem warped and it caused me such strife that I had thought about ordering a whole lot of new screens, but now thanks to Matt I can fix all my warped screens, and you can too!

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Review of Screen Technique’s Ergonomic Squeegees

Months ago, I was sitting by the front door of my shop killing time by reading Impressions Magazine, which you should subscribe to if you don’t already. Anyway, there was an ad for ergonomic squeegees called “EZ Squeegee” made by a company called Screen Technique. I was definitely interested, but always being on a tight budget, I never ordered any until recently. I bought a 9″, 12″, and 15″ model. They’re not cheap as it cost me about $100 including shipping for the three squeegees. I previously had only used wooden squeegees, having about ten in use, 4 10″ and 4 14″ as well as a couple of 15 or 16″ squeegees. They work well but after a while printing with them, the wood starts to feel rough. Using wooden squeegees for the six hour print job I did a few weeks ago wore a blister on my right hand between my thumb and index finger, which has turned into a big callus with continued printing.

Anyway, the ergo squeegees are pretty great. At first, I didn’t think they were that fantastic, but after doing a few hundred prints with them, I really like how they are designed and using them.

Positives:

• Ergonomically designed! It’s just easier and more comfortable to use them, and it reduces strain on your fingers and wrists in long print runs.
• They are magnetic and come with a metal clip to go on the end of your screen, which is awesome, for the most part. It allows you to do your one or two print strokes then do your flood stroke, pulling the squeegee towards you then you just lay the squeegee down and it clings to the metal clip with magnetic force, then you can let your screen up and pull off the shirt or spin to the next screen or whatever.
• Much thicker than normal wooden squeegees, so it feels like a more natural grip because your hands are not clenched so much.

Negatives:

• Cost. They are well designed and probably worth $30 each, but I can’t afford to get 4 of each size, at least not at this time. Wonderful for doing one or two colors since I have three, but what about when I do a 4 color print for hours and want four identical size blades? I’ll just have to budget for it, when I can afford to treat myself.
• There’s a ridge across the top of the squeegee where the two pieces of plastic met. Out of the three squeegees I got, the ridge is a little rough on two of them, which rubs against your skin, becoming unpleasant after a while of printing. It’s not a huge deal but I would prefer it not to be there and thought that they could have designed it to avoid that.
• It’s easy to flood and get ink onto the metal clip that goes on the top of the screen’s frame so that when you lay down/cling the squeegee to the clip, you get ink on the squeegee. I’ve been having this happen when I just have too much ink in the ink well area of the screen, so I’ve had to stop and clean off the clip and the squeegee at times. I like having a lot of ink on the screen to make flooding easiest (doing a flood stroke in just one stroke is best to avoid bleeding and can so be done with adequate ink on the screen), so I will just have to deal with it and work to avoid it.

So, overall, really nice squeegees. I’ll use them every time I can. When I get more, I will get a higher durometer, 80 instead of 70, just to have it more firm across the length of the entire blade.

I think this is going to be one of those things in screen printing that makes me look back and wonder how I ever got along without it.

(NOTE: I am no way endorsed or compensated by Screen Technique for doing this product review.)

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Experiments with saved red-pigmented discharge

I had some red-pigmented discharge left from a previous experiment and I wanted to do another very small print run with it to see if it was still any good.  It was about 12 days old.

I went to my first Krav Maga class the day before and really enjoyed it. They sold Krav Maga shirts there for between $22 and $30 and I didn’t think they were that great and I of course could make my own, so I did:

That’s leftover red-pigmented discharge through a 156 mesh screen onto an Alternative Apparel acid wash black shirt. Alternative Apparel has some really cool shirts, but they are expensive, even wholesale. I’ve gotten a few for myself and really think highly of them. The acid wash effect shows through the discharge print.

I did a couple others. This one is the same discharge but on a brown Hanes Beefy-T:

I had heard that Beefy-T doesn’t discharge well but this one seemed to work fine.

I also wanted to try it on a light colored shirt, so I did it on a Gildan G200/2000 Salmon shirt:

A normal red ink would have worked fine on that pink/peach color shirt, of course, but I wanted to see how it would work printing a pigmented discharge design onto it, and it worked just fine.  It’s unnecessary to use a pigmented discharge on such a shirt color, as its light enough to show any spot ink color.

The shade of the red-discharge seemed to have become more orangish than the original true red, but I’m not sure if that wasn’t due to the shirts themselves. I think that it didn’t change a little after being mixed and refrigerated for almost two weeks.

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Mixing big batches of pigmented discharge to save

I haven’t tried this yet, but Matt at Westix told me that some printers will mix up a batch of pigmented discharge and adjust the pigmentation until they get the exact color they want, then they will have a lot to save. They must add the agent to a small amount removed from the big mix, then test print that, because they can save up the mixed pigmented discharge only if they don’t add the agent powder that activates it. Later when they need to use the color, they can remove some of the ink from the container, which is just the discharge ink binder and pigment, then add agent, stir it up and print, knowing what color they will get. I haven’t done this yet but I may in the future. It’d be nice to do for a general color, not just a specific color for a custom order, but more like if you wanted to have a nice blue green or a bright red on hand at all times, some color that is difficult and/or time consuming to mix accurately.

I have some red-pigmented discharge left from experimenting a few days ago and I’m going to use it again today. I’ll test print with it first, but I expect it to still be potent.

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Quick tip: Keeping sizes separate to save time

The other day I had a pretty big order for me. It was 260 shirts, orange and white discharge on the front and orange discharge on the back of dark chocolate Gildan g200 shirts.  My average order size for August was 57 pieces and that’s about average for the year so 260 shirts was actually I think my second biggest order yet.

That’s a lot of shirts. It takes a while to just stack them before you print them. I knew it would take a long time to separate them by sizes after I finish printing them, so I had the idea to keep the sizes separate.  This works well to save time. In the boxes from Alpha Shirt, my blanks distributor, the shirts are folded by size, so when I removed them from the boxes I kept the sizes separated and stacked them by their size, Adult small up to 2XL adult. There were youth sizes too but I just kept all of them together.  Then I printed them in batches of each size. I have a lot of boxes that I’ve made into catch bins to go at the end of my oven’s conveyor belt, so I would let each size have its own box. I did keep all the youth sizes together, as I didn’t have quite enough boxes for all nine different sizes, and there weren’t a ton of youth shirts so separating them wasn’t a big deal. I printed all the backs first (orange-pigmented discharge), keeping the sizes in separate catch boxes, then stacked them all, keeping them divided, then printed the fronts letting each size have its own catch bin. The backs were white and orange pigmented discharge, so I printed orange first then the white without flashing, “wet-on-wet.”  Then when it came time to box them up, I didn’t have to sort and take the time to see what size shirt I was pulling out of a bin, I could just quickly pick one out and stack it, then when I had a stack of six I folded them together and boxed them. I probably saved an hour by doing this. Each size having its own catch box is good because I would have had to use multiple bins anyway.

I like to make things quick and easy. Work smarter not harder.

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Friday experiments

I had time to try a couple of experiments last Friday. I had received a new red pigment, Matsui “Neo Red MFB,” from Westix, one that is better for mixing a red-pigmented discharge. I’ve always searched for a good way to do red on black, and this experiment actually turned out well, so I will now use red-pigmented discharge for any orders that need the color combination.  I had to mix and remix for a while, doing about four test prints before I got a satisfactory result, then I printed a couple of shirts.  It seems way more forgiving than the previous red pigment that I had used, with which I never got a good red, but more like pinkish or orangeish.  Here are a couple of pictures:

Unsane is a noise rock band that I like, so I chose them as the subject for this test shirt. I haven’t washed the shirt yet, but I believe it will be totally washfast.

Oftentimes, people want a black shirt with both red and white printing. White pigmented discharge and red pigmented discharge printed separately with butt registration may now be a good solution for some of those designs, but I still am interested in Gen4 hybrid inks for this reason, if it makes sense to use a white underbase for the specific design. I am very soon doing a print run of hoodies that will use red and white, using the white as an underbase, and if that goes well I will probably order at least a quart of the red and white Gen4 inks.  I’m a little nervous about doing the print run, but it should come out fine.

Many months ago, my friend said he wanted a pink on black Metallica shirt, because he thought it would be funny.  Since then I’ve grown to really like Metallica’s early work, so I decided to do pink on black shirts. I have a bright neon pink ink from Spectrachem, which is a great color but otherwise a lousy ink. I wanted to combine that ink with Matsui’s awesome Metallic Binder and see if I could get a sparkly pink print, and it worked:

My concern is that the print will fade, because it’s a generally bad idea to combine different ink brands. I’ll know after I wash mine.  I was really happy with how the print came out. I did a batch of six, and ended up doing about four layers of the ink on each shirt. If I had done a white underbase and then the mixed ink on top, I would not have had to do so many layers, but honestly if it’s only six shirts I’d much rather easily do four layers than fool around with a white underbase.

Note the slight contortion in the middle of the Metallica logo. This is one of my pet peeves, when the shirts get distorted when I pull it off my platens after applying tack.  That stuff is so sticky that the first couple of shirts printed get contorted when removed, as they stick extremely well to the platens, too well.  Sometimes I blot the platens with a dud shirt for about a minute each to try to tone down the adhesiveness. I just had the idea to load a shirt on the just tacked platen and pass a dry squeegee over the shirt, then remove the shirt and do it again, to try to knock down the tack a degree.  The agressiveness of the tack also causes problems if I have to stick a film to it in order to register a multi-color print, as the platen paper can get messed up when removing the film when it is stuck down so hard.  On the other hand, if the tack has been used for a while, the film won’t stick well, so I end up using spray adhesive in order to get the film to stick better.  I still search for The Perfect Tack.

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Easy color separations in Photoshop

Someone emailed me that other day to ask how to separate the colors in Photoshop in a multiple-color design that she wanted to screen print. I went over the process of how I do it, and I will go over it here as well.

1- Make sure that all your colors are flat, no shading or gradiation, all colors must be flat.  What you are going to do is to make every color its own layer. To do this, use the magic wand tool, turn off the “continguous” check box and click on a color. Every section of that color should be selected now. Then go to Layer, New, Layer via Cut, and boom, that color is now its own layer. Label the layer with the name of the color so that you don’t get confused later. Do that with every color until each color is in its own layer.  (If there is a little bit of shading or fading of the color, one thing you can do is to increase the tolerance so that it selects the color and shades real close to that color.)

2- Once every color is in its own labeled layer, it’s time to make them all pure black. Remember, the designs printed onto your films has to be as black as possible for proper burning of the screen. If it’s not as black as you can get it, then you will have trouble washing out the screen to make the stencil. So to make the layers black, select one layer from the right-side menu and use the magic wand again to select all of the color, then hit shift+f5 to use Fill to make the color into pure black. When you get to the Fill menu, select Black from the top pull down menu under Contents, Use:. This should make every part of that layer pure black. Repeat this for every layer/color.

3- Add crosshairs for registration. You’re going to want to print crosshairs at the corners of every film so that you can line up the screens on the press. To make crosshairs, I just use the line tool to draw crosses in the corners.  Make the crosshairs an appropriate size for the mesh count you’ll be burning. If you make crosshairs out of lines that are really thin, they may not come out well in a low mesh screen, or at all.

4- Print out your films. To print one color at a time, just use the Layers box towards the right side of the screen to turn on visibility of just one layer and also the crosshairs layer, so that they are the only parts that show. When you print, it will just print what’s showing, IE the one layer/color of the design and the crosshairs. After you print that layer, uncheck the visibility of that color and check the next color, and on and on until you’ve printed all the layers out. Just be sure that you’re printing crosshairs with every layer.

That’s it, pretty easy really. The only time it becomes a big deal is if the artwork isn’t flat, if it has shading or fading. You can work around this by adjusting the tolerance with the magic wand and trying to capture all the fading that is supposed to be the related flat color before making it into a layer. If you do this, make sure the tolerance is at the same number when you use the magic wand before doing a Fill, so that all the fading is selected and then turned black.  After you print the films, you can line them up to make sure it all looks proper before you burn the screens.

Happy printing.

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