Week 43, 2014 – Make Cool Shirts, Phase One

Screenprinting Workspace

My Ryonet DIY Starter Press, bolted to table in the kitchen. With a 20×26″ t-shirt/sign platen, and 20×24″ 156 mesh screen.

Well, I finally got my ass in gear and started working on things. It wasn’t easy. The apartment is still congested, and I can’t get to anything (Seriously, you don’t even want to know what it looked like behind the camera, let alone in any other room.)

Before I give you a tour of the gear, lemme run you through a quick print I did.  This screen didn’t turn out well, it was under-exposed for whatever reason, but since I knew this wasn’t really a ‘keeper’, I mostly did this to buck myself up by doing something productive, as well as to show my mother– who had come by –the process (Not that she didn’t know, both my parents had been making silkscreens long before they’d made me), and finally, to take photos for a montage to use as banners on the MAKE COOL SHIRTS YouTube channel and Twitter account. Read more…

Week 40, 2014 – MAKE COOL…whats?

Hey, welcome back!  I’m still alive somehow!  First bit of news I have to report is that I’m almost to the point where I can begin commercially screenprinting!  Progress has been slow, because I’m still recovering from all the calamities that seem to befall me with alarming regularity. However, I’m close enough that it has warranted a domain purchase!  So, say hello to MAKE COOL SHIRTS!

In keeping with my usual shenanigans, I wanted the name to be tongue-in-cheek, so originally I was going to go with ‘Shirtstorm’. (Because, for starters, I thought the fact that it sounded like ‘shitstorm’ was funny… I am a simple creature.) And the logo would be a tornado of t-shirts… But apparently that name is already in use, so I said to hell with it.  ‘MAKE COOL SHIRTS’, using a t-shirt as the T literally came to me first thing in the morning, and by the end of the day I had the domain, and the domain had a splash-page with the logo.  Looking back now, it seems like the natural extension of this site, given that developing my ability to screenprint to such a degree was a direct result of my need to MAKE COOL THINGS.  :D

Second bit of news besides the fact that I’ve drastically expanded my screenprinting capabilities, is that I bought a sheet metal bending brake from Harbor Freight.  I’m going to detail all the screenprinting stuff in the next post, because I still have one more order coming in that actually serves to really enable my press.  I also haven’t even unboxed the brake yet, it arrived Friday, and it’s still all bagged and slathered in what I’ve come to call ‘slow-boat grease’, as it’s what anything rust-prone and Made In China arrives from Harbor Freight utterly drowned in… So that will have to wait for later, too.  I should note that I got it– and ordered some aluminium from ’80/20 Garage Sale’ on eBay –in preparation for making my own flash-drying unit for curing ink on the shirts, because a heat gun was not cutting it.

Week 42, 2013 – PCB Process Revisited

So, as some of you know, I’ve had no end to trouble producing printed circuit boards (PCBs); there’s always some damn thing that isn’t quite right…  Toner transfer is always a crapshoot, quality-wise.  And photo-resist is iffy because my laser printer can print good high-density positives, but not negatives, and my CraftRobo can’t cut rubylith fine enough for the kind of PCBs I’m making…

I’m left with two options;  Screen-printing resist to the board. (Since burning screens is a positive image process)  Or! Using lithographic film in an emulsion-to-emulsion contact exposure with my laser printer transparencies to yield perfect high-contrast negative films to expose the dry film laminated photo-resist on the PCBs with.  (I can also use lithographic ‘duplicating film’ to turn so-so positive transparencies into film positives with perfect contrast.)

Right now I’m just waiting on money for supplies.  Like a hundred bucks in chemicals, film, and darkroom stuff.

In the meantime, here’s some YouTube links!

Screen Printing!

No, this doesn’t involve the PrtScn key on your keyboard, I’m talking about Screen Printing— traditionally/colloquially referred to as silkscreening —squeegeeing ink through a stenciled textile mesh to print an image!

I’ve been wanting to develop the capability for a while, because it has uses in almost anything you can imagine.  But for one reason or another it’d never materialize.  Well, I finally fixed that…and I can’t even remember how that happened… I just have the stuff now, haha!

Anyway, I figured the first thing I’d do, is print something on the canvas cover we made for my 7×10 lathe.

Lathe cover, yay! ヽ(゚∀゚)ノ

I’ll detail the process, after the jump!

Read more…

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