ImagesMagUK_February_2021

www.images-magazine.com FEBRUARY 2021 images 51 SCREEN PRINTING Keekaboo: M&R Diamondback Press from Screen Print World Scott Stewart, co-owner Tell us a bit about your business I started Keekaboo with my wife Louise in 2013 after 20 years in the music industry working for distributors and booking European tours for bands, as well as touring in bands myself. Getting T-shirts printed as a band was always a bit of a minefield. There were few good options for bands to sell merchandise online at the time, and I had some experience building websites, so we put a package together to offer bands merchandise supply, a custom online shop, and order fulfilment. We’ve now been doing that for seven years, as well as other bits and pieces (fulfilment for crowd-funded campaigns and vinyl/ CD manufacturing). What’s the latest screen printing press you’ve bought? Our newest press is an M&R Diamondback E automatic, which we bought in November 2019 as our delivery times for new orders were slipping back to two to three weeks. We were outsourcing some jobs to get them done quicker so it was time. The press came in at about £30,000, but with conveyor dryer, two flash dryers, compressor, etc, you can double that. Why did you choose the M&R? M&R are generally loved by anyone who uses an M&R. I can’t really compare to other automatics as every printer is going to adapt their methods to their own press, but there’s not a lot the Diamondback can’t do. We generally have multiple jobs on the press at any one time and the revolver mode has come in handy. I haven’t personally used it, but we have a printer here who has tried it out a few times and it seems like a good option to have if you want to print-flash- print a colour without using an extra screen and an extra print head. Apart from that it’s fast, quiet, registration is perfect – everything you would expect from an automatic press. Is there anything you’d like to see in an upgrade or don’t particularly like about it? Not much I can think of. Winged flood bars as standard would be good. I’d have solid guidelines printed on all of the platens. One button to switch off all print heads would be handy. What’s it like to use? It’s great to use, and simple enough to learn. We replaced the original flood bars with winged ones, which help to keep things clean and prevent the need to scoop ink in from the sides of the squeegee. Registration is easy and holds perfectly. The press uses a central off-contact system so all of the platens are set up together and can’t have the off-contact set individually. We’ve had no problems with that, and it makes changing from printing a design on a T-shirt then a hoodie quick and simple. What sort of work is it used for? We mainly print merch for bands so T-shirts, hoodies, face masks, etc, from one colour to full-colour. Orders range from 10 units to 500+ per garment. The set-up time for a design is the same as it would be on a manual press so small orders may as well go on there too, and it’s easy to run a print test on one garment. We can also operate each station manually from the station if we need to. What other machines do you have? With the Diamondback we use an M&R Fusion dryer, two M&R Red Chili flash dryers, and a Mark MSM 4KW D screw air compressor. The flash dryers can either be controlled from the press or on their own. What would be your advice to others thinking of buying an automatic screen printing press? There’s a lot to learn and it’s going to be much easier to learn on a manual, but I don’t see a problem jumping straight to an automatic if you know you’ll have enough orders coming in. Automatics are expensive to buy, expensive to run, and we have three or four people working on each job at a time. If you’re a one-man operation, I’d say stick to a manual press – automatics are quick and realistically you’re going to struggle to get the press running so slowly that you can load and unload a garment in time. There is a decent dwell time setting on the Diamondback, but you would still need to be pretty fast. You can buy a no-shirt detector as an add-on, which will skip printing on any platen without a garment loaded. www.keekaboo.co.uk The M&R Diamondback Press is the newest press at Keekaboo