[jbarber160]

Hey there.. super newbie here wanting to learn how to properly screen print t-shirts. My buddy and I purchased a 4 color 2 station screen printing carousel and tried our hand at it last weekend. What we thought was going to be the hard part, getting the image on the screen, turned out to be fairly simple and the screen turned out great. However when we tried to print the image onto the shirt we encountered some issues I'd like some help with if possible.

1. The ink bled through the t-shirt and on to the t-shirt board. Did we use too much ink? Press too hard?

2. Should the screen contact the shirt when the screen arm is lowered onto the shirt? Ours was about 1/4" from touching the shirt when we tried to run the ink across. We tried pushing down on the screen while spreading the ink but wasn't sure what kind of contact there was supposed to be between the shirt and the screen.

3. The first print we did seemed to have way too much ink on the shirt and some of the design was covered in the ink where it wasn't supposed to be. We tried a couple more times with less ink and those areas were better but we didn't use enough ink and the whole design didn't print.

Looks like we need to make some adjustments to the screen arm and the t-shirt table, maybe that will fix our issues??

Thanks!

Jeff

 

[gardenhillemb]

You're starting out so you did get the hard part right - the screen.

1) Too much ink. You need to keep your squeegie angle high so you shear the ink off the screen. This helps the ink release from the screen and also helps with the amount of your deposit. You don't want to push the ink through the shirt, just into it.

2) Your off-contact should typically be around 1/16" depending on the tension of your screen. The object is for your screen to release from the shirt/ink as you pull (or push) the squeegie.

3) The amount of ink layed down will be better if you address 1 & 2.

Good Luck and Good Printing!