Preliminary report on screenprinting.....

[Chris Crosskey]

David Halliday wrote....

>Couple of tips - mount the screen with hinges on a sheet of plywood (
>this is probably what they are doing already ).  Then use masking tape
>to fasten a sheet of cardboard approximately where the image is. This
>keeps ink off of your plywood and is cheap and can be replaced when
>dirty. 
>

I was thinking of a bit more engineering than this to make it 
absolutely fixed in position, drop a panel into the holder (probably 
formica, thanks for the idea) and the panel artwork will be keyed to 
be in exactly the right place. If I use an A4 sized screen and always 
position the artwork the same way and place and make the hinge 
properly it will always work....

>Make the jigs out of pieces of sheet Formica or thin plastic.  Use a
>"hinge" of masking tape along one edge ( blue masking tape works best )
>and get everything positioned as close as possible.  When a few trial
>runs shows that it is positioned correctly, lift the jig up at the
>hinge, lay down a few inches of double-stick cloth carpet tape and go
>for it. 

See above, I want an OTT engineering solution for this...... 

>
>If you use a large screen, you can put several images on the screen and
>use masking tape and butcher paper to mask out the ones you don't want
>to use.  You could probably do six or eight module faces per screen.
>

Big screens are out, my artwork generation is limited to A4 and I'll 
be better off being able to run single panels anyway.....


>The downside to using a large screen is that they do stretch a bit - go
>easy with the squeegee ( I would love to know where that word came
>from... )
>
>
>For doing artwork, one way to go is to render the art twice life size
>and use a "stat" or "process" camera to shoot the image onto litho film.
>This will give absolute solid black and clear images nice and sharp
>since your dots per inch will be doubled.  Start with as sharp an image
>as possible - it does make a difference.
>

Not possible with my sofware really, I'm getting sharp print on 
acetate if I run it through the Deskjet two or three times anyway. I 
might bother making artwork primitives for Scooter so I can plot them, 
that'd solve all my problems, but it would take ages to make the 
primitives I think.....

chrisc