Images_Digital_Edition_August_2019

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT www.images-magazine.com 64 images AUGUST 2019 What if I told you that screen tension was a secret way that your shop could make more money? Marshall Atkinson is a leading production and efficiency expert for the decorated apparel industry, and the owner of Atkinson Consulting. Marshall focuses on operational efficiency, continuous improvement, workflow strategy, business planning, employee motivation, management and sustainability. He is a frequent trade show speaker, article and blog author, and co-founded Shirt Lab, a sales and marketing education company, with entrepreneur Tom Rauen. atkinsontshirt.com incredibly soft, the colours vibrant, perfect and tight registration. Those prints are made with all different ink sets, presses, people and shop environments. What could be the one factor that links them together for print quality? Tension and print quality Those shops take incredible care to ensure that they are using the best- made screens for those jobs. This is where tension starts to make you money. Tight screens give you crisp, sharp edges. Prints are smooth, not rough. The ink sits on top of the shirt fabric, not driven through it like a nail, which influences opacity. Tension matters. If you were to peek underneath the press when you are printing the shirt you could see that when your squeegee travels across the mesh during the print stroke, the screen mesh actually touches the fabric of the shirt for an instant. High-tension When the mesh tension is high, the mesh will snap back up instantly, leaving the ink with a smooth finish on the substrate. Low-tension With low screen tension, the mesh touches the surface of the shirt longer. It doesn’t snap back fast enough. Due to physics, what’s left behind is a rough, bumpy print. When printing over an underbase, the top colour could print irregularly and leave some small, unprinted dots. Pick-up For multicolour jobs, because the low-tension mesh has more contact with the wet ink of previously printed colours, it tends to pick up the ink on the back of the screens. This causes opacity issues with printed colours, and sometimes blurry looking edges where the colours might touch in the image. Poor ink opacity Low-tension can also require you to double stroke the print. Worse, many printers then feel obliged to add more squeegee pressure. I’ve been to shops where every screen hit is a double stroke. Printers commonly blame the ink first, then the press. That’s why for those printers it takes twice as long to print, and they use more ink as well. It is incredibly common for print shops to blame everything but their poor screen room craftsmanship. Here is something to consider. If ink or a particular press works for other people, but not you, maybe the problem isn’t with that product. Are you really using it correctly? Surfing the mesh wave Another common problem is a combination of low-tension screens and too much squeegee pressure. This creates a ‘wave’ that travels in front of the squeegee during the print pass. This typically causes the ink to smear as it doesn’t drop down perfectly onto the shirt, but prints a little ahead of the squeegee. At the edge of the image, this causes the ink to smear instead of having a crisp edge. Not only that, when the ink isn’t completely shearing through the mesh and onto the garment, it can build up in your screen. This can prevent details from printing, or produce a blurry print. Great screens make you money Here’s a concept that I want you to consider. When your screens are perfect, everything is easier on the print floor. You don’t have to double stroke on an automatic press to get opacity. Screen registration is a breeze. That saves time, and time, as we all know, is money. Plus, on the money side, every time you double stroke your ink you are using twice as much ink to get the same result. Let’s say that your opportunity cost for your press is £300 per hour. For some shops that’s too low but, for this example, it is a good conservative number. £300 per hour is equal to £5 per minute. As everyone probably knows, I like screen set-up time to be under five minutes per screen. But let’s say we’re dealing with that example shop mentioned before. They took around ten minutes per screen for their set up because nothing was lining up. After adjusting their workflow to take screen tension into consideration, they got their set- up times down to about six minutes per screen. That’s a four-minute per screen saving. Like a lot of shops, they average about three screens per job and print about ten jobs per day. So that can be expressed as: 3 (screens per job) x 10 (jobs per day) x 4 (minutes per screen savings) x £5 (opportunity cost per minute) = £600 per day savings. Per press. Every day. So, tell me again how you don’t have time to measure your tension? A last word on screen tension This isn’t anything new, is it? Hopefully not, but there are plenty of people posting online in groups or forums that don’t comprehend the importance of screen tension. So, as people love checklists I’m going to offer one. ■ Regularly use a tension meter. If you don’t have one, buy one. Learn how to use it. ■ Design, as part of your screen room workflow, when the tension should be measured for your screens. Who is doing it? When are they doing it? How are you recording it on the screen? ■ Set a minimum shop tension level. This is the lowest level screen tension that you will use in your shop. Explain to your staff what this means and why you have it. ■ Train your staff. Screen room crew certainly, but your print and art staff as well. Illustrate what success looks like. ■ Reach out to your suppliers for help. You can get better screens. Training is available too. Don’t be in the dark. ■ Don’t make excuses. “It’s how we’ve always done it” is not a valid reason for not having best industry standards in your shop. As my friend Alan Howe of SAATI is always fond of saying, “Screens are equipment”. Treat them as such.