Richard...mineral spirits works well. You can also call a local company that delivers and hauls away barsol tanks used by garages to clean auto parts. It is cheap compared to any other way, and safe for little varmit critters. We don't like them to taste like kerosene when we eat them, now do we?
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Last edited by Greg Hamrick; April 16th, 2007 at 12:24 PM.
An industry ink degrader and or press wipe is your best bet. Yes Mineral spirits will work yet not the best thing to be breathing for long periods of time.
Also the oils left from mineral spirits can cause issues with emulsion adhering properly if not decreased correctly.
Will the cleaning change the design of the screen. I am thinking of using a screen to print my t-squares and I will be having one made but I want to re-use it again and again.. need an authority on this..
I would suggest you use a commercial screen ink degrader as they will do the best job. Mineral spirits will leave a residue that will cost you more money to clean out of the mesh during the degreasing. The use of lacquer thinner is a definite No-No when using a pure photopolymer emulsion as it will 'lock' the emulsion into the mesh. Underexpose your emulsion and then use lacquer thinner and risk having to 'reclaim' your mesh with a razor blade.
As for making a permanent image on a screen and using it over and over again, this is a very bad idea. There are so many things wrong with this that I can't explain them all in this forum, but here are a few...
1. The mesh begins to relax almost immediately and continues to relax until the screen is discarded or the mesh is retensioned. If you place an image on the screen and place it on a shelf, the mesh will continue to relax. The next time you take the screen down the mesh openings are going to be smaller and it will be more difficult to transfer the ink through the mesh openings. The first time you use the screen you can print with one stroke, the next time it may may take two strokes and then later it will take three strokes. Who wants to print two strokes to produce the job when they could have done it with one stroke? Who wants to take twice as long to print the job? Three times as long? Any takers out there?
2. Do you want to invest your money in a screen with a particular job on it and store it for months in that rented space, when you could be using the screen on other work? In most shops you can produce a screen for about $3 to $4. To keep a screen on the shelf means it is going to cost you more than the reclaim cost. It is really simple math, folks. It don't pay to invest your money in equipment, i.e. screens, that do not have a return on their investment.
Are there people who store their screens in libraries? Oh, hell yeah! There are people who do a great many things until one day they learn that they have been doing it wrong and change their ways.
There have been many articles written on this subject over the past 30 years, some of them mine, and I have not read one yet that could justify the existence of the screen library. The jury is in on this one. Do not store screens longterm.
This is extreme, but one of my consulting clients in Chicago purchased a business that had been in operation for twenty-two years. The owner was selling because he had never been able to actually pay himself a salary. His wife worked and was constantly putting money in the business to make it work. When I arrived at the shop, I was given a tour by the past owner. When I asked about his screenroom, he took me to a second floor which was filled with screens. I am sure that my mouth dropped open.
I did a little math on the spot - these were the old wood frames that are actually quite small and the wood was only one inch thick. The room measured 60-feet wide allowing about 600 screens in each of the 6 rows for a total of 7200 frames per aisle. There were 20 aisles from the front of the room to the back. The room was not quite filled completely, but still...
He went to the end of the room and picked up the last stored frame. He looked at the number and stated quite proudly that it was number 122,258. Over 120,000 individually numbered screens stored! I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I asked him why he was storing the screens in this manner. He stated that this was the way he had always done it. He was actually storing every screen he had ever made. I asked him how much the second floor rent was as I knew he was paying rent on the building. He said that it was half of the $7,200 he was paying for the building each month. This meant that he was paying $3,600 in rent to keep the screens stored. And, he has been paying that rent for twenty-two years. That means that his screen storage had cost him $950,400 in rent or about $7.77 to store each screen. He had actually been buying the screens from the supplier at a rate of $5 each on average. Which means that he could have thrown them away and saved almost $3 on each screen.
You can add another $611,290 for the cost of the screens to the $950,400 in rent for a total of $1,561,690 spread over 22-years. To reclaim the screens each time would have cost him only about $2. each and he would not have had the storage cost. This would have cost him about $244,500 over the years, saving him $1,317,190 or about $60,000 a year that could have made a nice little salary for himself.
The first thing the new owner did was invest in 100 Newman Roller Frames and clean out the second floor completely, which was then sublet for a profit. He also purchased an M&R automatic and hasn't looked back. Today, almost five years after having purchased the business he is quite successful. He has someone quite capable running the shop and doesn't have to go to work at all.
cleaning plastisol on screens. 
