The quality you need
Just like any purchase the job starts with you, the customer. Whether you need something for your business, organization, school, or family function we will work with you to develop and refine your ideas in order to produce a quality screen printer product. To help you understand the screen printer process and enhance our business relationship we have put together a description of the steps involved in the process.
Screen Prints up to 14″ x 14″ in as many as 8 colors. Manual and Automatic Machines.
Any order size*, 12 to 12,000, or more.
Step 1 Design Creation
The first thing that we need before we can screen print is a design. After the customer has picked a design he or she likes it then needs to be color separated so that we can create a screen for each color in the design.
Step 2 Film Production
Once we have suitable artwork we then create a film positive. Once we have our film positives we can then create our screens.
Step 3 Screen Creation
Screen printer creation actually begins long before we even have our film positives ready. The first thing that we do is take a screen which has a very fine mesh fabric attached and apply a special light-sensitive material called emulsion. The screen is then placed in a dark cabinet so that the emulsion can dry. Once the emulsion is dry we can then finish the screen creation process. We take our positive and place it on the screen and put the screen in a special light exposing unit. When exposed to the light the emulsion that is not covered by the black areas of the positive become hard. Once the screen has been exposed for the proper amount of time it is removed from the light unit and is then washed so that the soft emulsion can be removed exposing the mesh holes. We then let the screen dry and we are ready to set the screen up on the press.
Step 4 Press Set-up
Once we have good quality screens containing the image of our customer’s designs we are then ready to set them up on our press. If the design involves multiple colors we set each screen at one of the stations and register each one so that each color of the design lines up properly. Once we have all of our screens registered we place ink on each screen and run a test print on a test square. If the test print is satisfactory we are ready to run the job.
Step 5 Printing
If our artwork, screens, and press set-up is good the printing is the easy part. Each garment is placed on one of the stations of the rotary press and each color of the design is applied. After all of the colors are applied the garment is removed and placed on a conveyor dryer so that the ink can be cured. Once cured, the garments are boxed and are ready for delivery.
