Screen Printing - Technical Articles and Info

Proper emulsion exposure is crucial to your bottom line. Nothing is more costly than having a press stop during production.

During the exposure process, light activates the photo sensitizer to cross link the emulsion’s chemistry.

When a emulsion ‘locks in’ a screen during reclaiming it can be very difficult to remove.  The cure is prevention and following good screen making techniques.

Practical techniques to capture and stretch Smartmesh using typical stretching machines or frames to preserve the mesh and obtain optimum screen performance.

These finer meshes require fine tuning your stretching process and handling techniques. A handy guide to understand how to stretch S and LX mesh.

Quite often we run into shops where price determines the products used for production.  Following this line of thought, everything then should be bought based on price.  Ever try that with your car?

3D foiling is an easy to use technique to achieve a brighly faceted foil embellishiment. Foiling has regained popularity over the past few years as an accent in water base and discharge ink prints.

Repeat sales are golden. No sales calls, marketing, or sweat equity is needed. The customers have seen the quality of your prints before and trust your capabilities

The emulsion exposure strength and image quality is dependent on proper coating techniques.

Your exposure system determines your success in screen printing.

The screen room plays an important role in exposure quality and how it performs on press. In most shops the screen room is given little thought other than to make it somewhat light safe to avoid exposed screens.

S Mesh excels at printing base plates, waterbase and discharge, high solids acrylics and special effects inks.  Find out how to handle these finer meshes and what print solutions S-Mesh from Murakami offers.

Murakami Thick Film Stencils can open up creative print techniques that can enhance standard graphics and provide new print offerings for your customers.

Automatic textile presses require more company resources than meets the eye.  Too often buyers focus on the maximum production index speed without realizing the sub systems necessary to reach maximum production.

Moire is the interference of halftones and mesh. This interference is the result of mesh or mesh knuckles blocking some or part of the halftones in an image. Generally moire is controlled by...

The word ‘linearization’ seems confusing, it seems to have no association with screen printing and yet the process is often overlooked, but very crucial to halftone print quality.

Examine the difference between obtaining an image on a screen versus exposing the screen completely.

Screen room personnel often use sight and touch to determine when a screen is ready to shoot, but quite often it is what we can’t see that affects the final stencil.

Let’s gets back to the basics of screen making!

S-Mesh from Murakami has significant advantages for easier transfer of ink due to a greater percentage of open area.  This open area requires less squeegee pressure to print that conventional T mesh.

Screen Printing can vary from a printed medical circuit, to a 14 color simulated process masterpiece on a t-shirt, to a 100 screen fine art serigraph. While the print process is very similar, it’s the art that we use to make the screen that is unique to the product being printed.

As a company grows an owner may have moved from a labor position to a management position. Gone are the days when screens were prepared correctly.

Spot Color Channels are the basis for many screen printing techniques like simulated process, index, or simple spot color prints.

Optimize screen life by preparing durable stencils with quality products and screen making techniques .