printing flatstock with tshirt press (all colors at once)

[edwardo_machino]

Recently I rebuilt the top of my shirt press, and last night I tested it for registration accuracy and a few other things. It was a four color print on black, so four screens at once - white under-base, red, tan, and black on top.

I fucked up quite hard and mixed up which screens were for black and tan - realized this after the ink went down and pulled a few. Had to clean them up on the press since the other screens were inked already. I used tan housepaint, so this, unfortunately, permanently blocked off some of the detail in the black screen which I couldn't pop out, which you will notice in the pictures (especially around the edges - there should be no tan outline). But as this was a test and I didn't feel like tearing down the whole job, I went ahead anyway.

I ran test prints on paper, for registering the other screens, then printed some fabric. Came out fine with the exception of the missing parts of key image due to my fuckup and perhaps a little brighter white next time:




The test was done so I figured I'd try a bit of wet-on-wet with paper. It worked, but not too well. Then I tried again but hit the paper very briefly with a heat gun between colors and it came out decently:







Besides the tan paint other colors were Nazdar 9500 textile ink, so maybe result would've looked better had I used ink for paper.

So have any of you ever tried printing multiple colors on flatstock with a rotating press? Maybe there are some situations where this method would be appropriate. I'm going to try again sometime with ink for paper and maybe different meshes (this was 196 for white and red, 280 for tan and black).

[NeroInferno]

Before I started to screenprint I asked here if with a carousel I could print paper. The main cons is a) you haven't a vacuum b) inks needs to dry. In my opinion, also if I have seen people to print stickers and poster on carousel, these are the 2 main reason for a pain work. It's better to print commonly, saving time and frustration. Screenprinting requires time, this time can be shorted if you have a conveyor dryer to dry stock, but without it it's better to proceed like always.

Fabio

[edwardo_machino]

Well, you don't need a vacuum as the platen adhesive works fine for holding the paper down. And if you hit the ink with a heat gun very briefly between color hits it works out.

I don't know what a good reason for using this method would be, maybe only if you were printing some high detail fabric stuff with high meshes and wanted to knock out some paper prints too without doing everything over. I don't know. But it was interesting to do it, and it worked pretty well despite my initial skepticism.