ImagesMagUK_January_2022

www.images-magazine.com JANUARY 2022 images 85 TIPS & TECHNIQUES Tony Palmer has been in the garment decoration industry for over 30 years and is now an independent print consultant working closely with print shops to get the most from existing processes and techniques. Tony is passionate about keeping and enhancing production skill levels within the industry. He is the owner and consultant at Palmprint Consultants, offering practical help and assistance to garment decorators all over the globe. www.palmprintuk.com This new customer does not want to pay for ‘set-up’ because the guy down the road printing single-colour in his mum’s back bedroom doesn’t charge it. He wants white on black and black on white, pink on the blue shirts and blue on the pink and the yellow. He simply can’t see why he has to pay a colour change fee as it’s the same design. This means you must be slick in the changeovers and downtime – predicting what you need when the press stops can reduce the lost time. An auto can produce 100 shirts in six minutes; if you spend 20 minutes setting it up and taking it down, then it’s obvious where you should concentrate your speed focus. 6 Look after the squishy things! The hardest thing for a print shop to control, whether it is a well- experienced, multi-automatic press shop or a single operator with a manual press who is just starting out, is the staff. Screen print is not the most attractive profession: we tend to take home more ink than is necessary, we smell like the toilets in a chemical factory, and we can produce the most colourful, fluffy bogeys that any children’s entertainer would be proud to conjure up! Finding a willing volunteer to stand at the washout boot, knee deep in toxic waste that looks like it will soon birth a superhero, or at the side of a machine that looks like it’s just waiting for your attention to drop so it can inflict the worst case of ‘squeegee rash’ that you have ever seen, requires a very specialised set of skills (if you didn’t read that in a Liam Neeson voice then we simply cannot be friends). Modern warehouse picking jobs are paying over the Living Wage, yet you are not Jeff Bezos and you have an ultimate price ceiling for the finished product and a maximum piece per hour. This usually means you only have the option of paying the National Living Wage for the long-suffering operators. It is important that you look after these squishy things and fully appreciate all the hardships they endure to produce prints that only the stalwarts that have had screenwash on a paper cut can appreciate. 7 Write it down Producing a jaw-dropping print that will make other printers say to their long-suffering partners, “Have you seen the registration on this?”, is a thing of beauty, but then next month the client wants a reprint run and you can not remember if you used a hard blade, a 20° angle or a double stroke. Make a template in the same shape as your press – you can even include the dodgy head that hasn’t worked since you ‘adjusted’ it with the hammer – and fill in this template with the five main solid variables that must be tamed on each print job: mesh, blade, speed, angle, pressure – the five hills on which we die every day. Record these for every job, whether it’s a white-flash-white job for the kids graduating from spending four weeks at school (how many leavers can you fit into one school year?) or the pseudo-process licensed work that you post on Instagram, only for it to be liked three times by your mum and her mates. 8 Don’t be afraid to try This refers to the comfort zone we all find ourselves in. Printing is not a dormant technique that sits nicely to attention, it’s a fluid beast that looks cute enough to pet, but will rip your arm off at the shoulder if you take your eye off it. The industry is constantly changing, and new techniques appear every week. Buy that new ink. Try that different mesh. See what happens when. All of these can lead to spectacular failures! But we are printers, that’s how we learn. 9 Automate Lots of new machinery which once was confined to the high-end printers is now available and affordable. I can coat a screen consistently now, but I’ve been practising since before the internet existed! An automatic coater might seem like a big investment, but once you start to introduce constants in the whole process, then you can start to standardise. On a Monday morning I am fresh from the relaxing weekend and I coat a screen at the same pace, the same pressure and the same angle – you could measure the emulsion on a coated screen and it would be within half a gram on every mesh. By Friday I am throwing the emulsion on from a foot away, I am scraping the coater so fast it leaves scorch marks, and the only coat I am interested in is the one I put on at 5 o’clock on my way out of the door. This all influences the exposure time, the longevity of the stencil and the sharpness of the print. Take the steps to ensure every step of the process can be repeated irrespective of the operator. 10 Have fun The art of slinging ink onto a shirt, polo, sweat or even a man-size all- in-one is tricky at the best of times. Add in the current pandemic and the global shortage of everything that only printers appear to need, and it can seem like a poor career choice. So, my last tip is to just enjoy the ride. Screen print can seem like a difficult profession to chase, but nothing beats that high as you step back and look at the job – the one that you swore would be the end of you – now stacking up at the end of the dryer with not a trace of the tears that flowed only one hour earlier as the registration moved, the ink stuck to the underside of the screen, and the catcher pointed out a leak that started 100 shirts ago. So, send a hot coin down the dryer, stack the shirts backwards and forwards in the same pile, ask “Is this is a back print?” 500 into a 600 front-print run, spray your co-workers’ shoes with glue, and have fun printing. The colour of the year, according to Tony!