ImagesMagUK_January_2022

www.images-magazine.com 84 images JANUARY 2022 Tony’s top 10 T-shirt printing tips Improve your textile screen printing in 2022 with these top tips from industry expert Tony Palmer 1 Control the process, control the print This is my wild card! It’s such a broad statement, but put simply it means that you must look at every aspect of the process and introduce a control measure – don’t leave anything to chance or the current ever- changing mood of the stencil tech. 2 Replace your squeegees This is an important point and yet one that I struggle to remember how to spell! Three Gs? Two Es? A sharp blade is important – your squeegee is the piece of equipment that transfers the ink onto the shirt; if it’s not sharp you will lose detail. Many operators have favourite blades, some of which have been with them longer than their diazo-stained fingers. The truth is that they are a consumable item; if you take a piece of rubber and rub it on a piece of nylon mesh 3,000 times every day (optimistic I know!) it will probably feel just as sharp as if you had just cut it from the roll with the canteen butter knife... If you repeat that process every day, soon you will start to notice a slight dulling to the edge, the same edge that is meant to give us that perfectly reproduced ® that the designer insisted was integral to the design and that you wanted to tape off. The manufacturers of the rubber have a twisted sadistic streak and they all meet at weekends over a glass of whisky in front of an open fire, stroking a long-haired cat and laughing out loud about how they all use different colours to represent the same hardness of rubber (shore). “This week 65 is red, but next week we will make it blue! Mwah-haa-haa!” Select the correct shore and blade for the job – don’t just use the one that’s clean. 3 Mesh selection As the whole process of printing gets more and more automated – there are now machines that will perform almost every task in a print shop – the choice of mesh per job is one of the last bastions of skill left in a busy shop. Understand the difference between a 90 and a 120 and use that knowledge wisely. Know when to drop the mesh count and when to compromise opacity for detail. 4 Quality over quantity Get the quality right! All of today’s automatic presses can run at speeds in excess of 1,000 prints an hour, but if the quality is bad then all you’ll have to show for your efforts is 1,000 bad prints flying down the tunnel dryer towards an unsuspecting catcher or cardboard box. Once the quality is set as a high standard then the speed will come naturally. Rushing the print process will result in left chest prints that look superb and crisp and pop right off the shirt, but they are all printed under the armpit because the loader was rushing. 5 You only make money when the squeegees are moving Again, this one sounds like a bland catch-all statement that is glaringly obvious, but the truth is that the long runs of yesteryear are very rare in today’s industry. They have been replaced with either a local club or business that has full access to a wholesale garment catalogue and whose cousin is a designer (ie owns a cracked copy of Photoshop) and just loves Pantone’s colour of the hour, ‘dusky-mardy- aromatic-wetdog-brown-9123456C’. “Control the process, control the print”; Tony shows how it’s done at Doomsday in South Wales