You can't get off the ground without first burning a screen. It's called screen printing for a reason. Learning to burn good, consistent screens is important. When I replaced the emulsion I was able to troubleshoot and burn a usable screen. What I didn’t know at the time was there was a simple fix. They all failed.Īnd I was staring down the barrel of a failing business. I tested different exposure times, coating techniques, and transparency. I spent days trying to burn a screen correctly. It was a hobbyist set up that included some spare ink and emulsion, a small tabletop exposure unit, screens, and a single color press with a flash unit. My original screen printing equipment was purchased off Craigslist. You have to get the screens on press, register multiple screens, flash and cure the ink, and coat and burn a screen, among other things. There’s a lot more to screen printing than moving a squeegee. However, I had never gone through the full process on my own. While I consider myself self taught, I had spent some time in other screen print shops and had pulled a squeegee once or twice before. I first started to teach myself how to screen print at the end of 2011. Learning How To Burn A Screenįor me, learning how to successfully burn a screen was the single hardest part about learning how to screen print. Keep reading below for a more in depth description of the entire process. We hope this update is informative and shows you just how many different ways people can burn screens for screen printing shirts. The LED light allows us to exposure two screens at once and cuts our exposure time to 30 seconds per exposure. We show how this works in the video above. We are using an LED light to expose screens. It's incredible that we don't have to worry about this anymore. The presence of glass in an exposure unit is the number one cause of pinholes in a screen. The second change is that because the image is written directly on the screen, we no longer require an exposure unit with glass. The black wax does not need time to dry and can be exposed immediately after the image is complete. Imaging the screen directly saves us a lot of time and the wax produces better detail than the film we used previously. A rip system to send the files to the computer, we pull them up on the computer, click print, and it does the rest. The first is that the image we are burning onto a screen is written on the screen with wax. There are two major changes to the process now that we have a CTS. You'll want to keep reading below because we go more in to depth on the process and because film and an exposure unit is the more common method for screen making. The video above gives a quick breakdown on how the CTS changes the way that we image and burn screens for the clothing that we print. It allows us to write each design directly onto a coated screen. Our new equipment is called a CTS which is short for Computer To Screen. Our new equipment eliminates the need for both of those items. When this post was originally written, we used film and an exposure unit to burn our screens. We are updating this post because in 2021 we brought in a new piece of equipment to make our screens and shirts even better.
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