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screen printing => Screen Making => Topic started by: tancehughes on March 15, 2014, 04:07:32 PM
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We've been moved in our new place for 3 weeks and have finally gotten around to building our screen room. Does anyone have comments, suggestions or tips for once I have It finished? It's about 20x15, we're going to have a window unit that heats and cools the room, and I'm getting 4 ft. Yellow lights for the room.
A rep from kiwo told me that if I coat in this room I need to keep my coating station off to one side and maybe curtained off to keep any moisture away from my coated screens that have dried. Any comments on that?
We are making a 4 ft door to ensure its plenty large enough to get our I image ste in once we purchase it (CANT WAIT!!!!)
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Have you considered UV safe LED lighting. It would be like working under regular white light instead of the yellow lights.
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Whatever you do, make sure you have a designated area for each stage of the screen through the room. Think through the layout in these terms. Screens should make a "U" through a room with one entrance.
1) Drying area for wet screens coming in from reclaim.
2) Coating area/drying rack
3) Storage of coated screens awaiting exposure
4) Area for applying films to the screens and/or DTS system
5) Exposure
6) Development
I reclaim and develop in the sink area outside of the screen room so moisture is less of a concern for coated screens.
Heating and cooling are nice but the best thing you can do is have filtered and dry air in the room.
A small household filter unit works great. You're just getting general dust out of the air so it need not be an ultra Gucci unit. Get one from a second hand store - people buy them all the time and find out how much replacement filters cost and abandon them. Even one with an old filter is fine for a screen room, as long as it was not used around pets before hand.
Make sure the incoming air from the window unit is filtered too.
A small dehumidifier combined with the air filter unit will keep the room clean and dry. Last time I bought one it was $10 at Goodwill.
Make sure the floors are smooth and finished, either painted, linoleum or otherwise. Bare concrete invites dust. Make sure the floor can easily be mopped clean. Vinyl wall base helps here big time. If a fixture, table or shelf can be on wheels, even better. Shop vac and mop often.
We use these magazine racks from Ikea to hold large film folders on the wall next to the film layout table:
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20118174/ (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20118174/)
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Have you considered UV safe LED lighting. It would be like working under regular white light instead of the yellow lights.
Thats a really good idea especially now that i just finished covering about half the lights in our basement! :o Those pretty easy to find?
Here is where I found the best deals for light covers during my searching, if you don't go the LED route-
http://www.uvps.com/product.asp?code=FILTER+++I (http://www.uvps.com/product.asp?code=FILTER+++I)
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To be honest not sure where to source them. Someone mentioned some large screen supplyers were starting to Cary them. I read an article a while back about them and someone posted pics of a screen room with them some time ago. I will most likely go that route when we do our screen room. I hate working under the yellow lights.
As long as you stay out of the 260nm-310nm spectrum you should be fine.
Greg has also suggested painting the walls and ceiling with a cream yellow color to absorb the stray UV. It was like a 1205U or something, I got it written down some where.
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Our new screen room setup is adjacent to the clean washout room. We have an open dirty sink area -> clean sink for resolving and degreasing to the right -> screen room right of that. All portals have amber vapor barrier strip doors from Uline on them and sticky mats on the screen room inside at each door. Both the dirty wash areas and the clean wash area are ventilated over the booths. Inside the screen room there is (well, there will be) a cabinet for screens that is also ventilated (gently) and humidity/temp controlled, coating station and then exposure. It's a U-shaped path of travel with the exception that screens go back into the clean sink room to be resolved and have hardener applied, then back to the drying cabinet. All screen movement will be on racks, it's kind of a hybrid of pass-through and rolling racks. We wanted to keep it flexible and versatile. I'll try and post pics when it's finally all buttoned up. There's also a hot box outside of this system for when we need to put a major hustle on a batch of screens or really cook out some long run WB/DC stencils.
I haven't hung lighting in the screen room yet, not much is needed since our coating station will be back lit with yellow sleeved bulbs (big help to see what's going on while coating and great for catching problems before you bother drying and exposing a screen) and the inspection table casts safe light up as well. I like the screen area to be dim with backlighting where you are coating and applying films, it helps focus on the details of the stencil. I would love to find out where to get LED lighting that doesn't output in that spectrum though. It would be nice to kick on bright, but safe, LEDs as needed and especially for weekly cleaning. We painted our screen room a medium-dark grey because the paint was basically free and cleaned, sealed and caulked up the wood floors. Ironically, it looks better than my office in there!
If you are going DTS, keep in mind that some of these DTS units need controlled humidity that may be very different from what you want for the screens as they dry and that area will need to be partitioned off most likely. If you use a setup like that fancy new M&R STE the footprint will be the same or maybe smaller than a traditional expo unit and you could use the area where the big expo unit was as the DTS station perhaps.
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We painted our room yellow.
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Have you considered UV safe LED lighting. It would be like working under regular white light instead of the yellow lights.
Can anyone give some suppliers for UV safe LED lighting?
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Challenge accepted. I need them anyway for when we do our screen room, maybe do the whole shop in them.
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Zoo that's the plan is to put our STE in the spot where our MSP 3140 is now.
If anyone finds the UV safe LED lights let me know!
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Here is an article I wrote on this very subject:
http://murakamiscreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Screen-Room-Design-for-Small-Auto-Shop.pdf (http://murakamiscreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Screen-Room-Design-for-Small-Auto-Shop.pdf)
The main area to be concerned about is moisture and humidity. Avoid having your wash out sink/developing sink in the same room you store your screens.
A dehumidifier in your screen room set to 35% helps create predictable screens. Screens are like sponges; they absorb the moisture in air. So a sink with mist coming off it is better outside the room with a hood or fan to pull the moisture away from your screen storage area.
Consider creating a drying closet in the screen room. If you use only SBQ pure photopolymers you can heat it to 100 degrees for quick drying. Place a fan in there as well, ceramic heaters or floorboard heaters with a thermostat are other cheap tools that help. A lot of coated screens in the room will affect dry screens. All depends on where you are located. Areas like Phoenix or the desert dry screens super quick anyway, so it may not have much affect on coated screens. Coastline of California, Washington/Oregon, Florida, the gulf states can experience high humidity. Helps to have a dehumidifier in these areas and to seal off the room with vapor barrier doors.
This is all designed to get predictable exposure strength. Stronger screens come from well dried screens. Water base and discharge both benefit from good screen room conditions. For plastisol it doesn't have to be perfect, you would only see issues on long runs, or in the form of pinholes. The other advantage of well dried screens is they can shoot faster than one that has absorbed moisture.
Al
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Zoo that's the plan is to put our STE in the spot where our MSP 3140 is now.
If anyone finds the UV safe LED lights let me know!
like these?
http://www.ledtronics.com/Products/ProductsDetails.aspx?WP=153 (http://www.ledtronics.com/Products/ProductsDetails.aspx?WP=153)
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One other tip.
Test how light safe your lights and screen room are.
Place a coated screen on the floor and put some coins on it.
Leave your lights on overnight.
In the morning wash out the screen. If you see the coin circles wash out before the surrounding area
you have light contamination issues. If the surrounding areas don't wash out at all you have strong
light contamination. this is a common cause of screens not washing out easily with screens that have been
in storage for several days.
Al
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One other tip.
Test how light safe your lights and screen room are.
Place a coated screen on the floor and put some coins on it.
Leave your lights on overnight.
In the morning wash out the screen. If you see the coin circles wash out before the surrounding area
you have light contamination issues. If the surrounding areas don't wash out at all you have strong
light contamination. this is a common cause of screens not washing out easily with screens that have been
in storage for several days.
Like This:
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Talked to Dave about the coin test today! Thanks everyone for the feed back
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Don't go out and buy led lights yet but in my research today it appears LED lights emit no UV or IR unless designed to do so. With this being said I will be buying some different styles of bulbs including fluro tube LED lights and set up the coin test when I get back in town. I will try it for two weeks and see what happens. If someone has already tried this please let me know.
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Brian got any updates?!
LED bulbs for the most part don't hit the right spectrum? I want to put up some new lights in our old embroidery room since we are taking the walls down and making it part of the printing area, but I was waiting for you to do the hard work and any "brain" work- I strain mine enough just trying to keep up with the forum! ;D
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That's from a manufacturers website
"Some industry sources claim that LEDs produce no UV radiation. This actually isn’t true. LEDs do produce a small amount of UV, but they emit even less. That’s because the amount that is produced is converted to white light by the phosphors inside the lamp."
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Slow down, so far I got a high bay (can) LED insert and a incandescent replacement each in its own makeshift dark rooms directly over 155 mesh screens coated 1/2 with Satti PHU. This stuff exposes pretty quickly so I figured it would be a good starting point. Started the expearment last Monday, would like to keep them in there until April 7th (two weeks) and see what happens. In my mind even if it does expose a small bit I will be able to tell how long the light is safe by how it washes out and go from there. If these bulbs work ill set up another test for a week using fluro tube replacements.
I don't want to rush this, if I'm wrong I could ruin a whole bunch of screens for myself and others. I would rather error on the side of caution.
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I'm about done building our screen room area and have done the coin on the screen test and with UV blocking light sleeves (400 and 500 nano blocking power) on both sets of lamps in the room (8 t5 5000k bulbs) and i'm still getting light scatter.
I have too change out all the bulbs for LED's and will be ordering new bulbs today.
I'll report back once they arrive and I re-test the room.
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Maybe someone from an emulsion company would be kind enough to jump in with some suggestions. I have yellow sleeves on my lamps. White light would usre be nice. I don't know how my screen guy can stand to work in that yellow light for 10 hours a day. 8)
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Yes you can get clear fluorescent sleeves from Encapsulite that are UV safe
Model: SO C20 UV Daylight White 400
Baypress sells them and there are others as well.
http://www.baypressservices.com/acatalog/Encapsulite.html (http://www.baypressservices.com/acatalog/Encapsulite.html)
Al
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Maybe someone from an emulsion company would be kind enough to jump in with some suggestions. I have yellow sleeves on my lamps. White light would usre be nice. I don't know how my screen guy can stand to work in that yellow light for 10 hours a day. 8)
We use the clear sleeves here at M&R in our screen department with good results. We have a portable meter that we use to monitor the area and it shows no U.V.
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Thanks, gentlemen.
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To be honest not sure where to source them. Someone mentioned some large screen supplyers were starting to Cary them. I read an article a while back about them and someone posted pics of a screen room with them some time ago. I will most likely go that route when we do our screen room. I hate working under the yellow lights.
As long as you stay out of the 260nm-310nm spectrum you should be fine.
Greg has also suggested painting the walls and ceiling with a cream yellow color to absorb the stray UV. It was like a 1205U or something, I got it written down some where.
FWIW, from the spectral analysis I've seen from exposure equipment, most are very active between 300-430 or so--IIRC, the 300 range is UVB and rather nasty for you even in small doses.
I know you can get 'white' LED's that will crosslink emulsion, although I'd think the 3K ones (that are supposed to look like incandescent bulbs) would be the way to go... probably would not be entirely light-safe, but more so than most of us need.
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I've got the clear sleeves from UV process that block up to 400 nm and the amber sleeves that block up to 500 nm.
BOTH of them FAILED the coin test on the screen after 4 hours of exposure in the room with the lights turned on.
I'll note that the clear sleeves cooked the screen completely, the amber sleeve was much better but still failed.
The bulbs being used are 4' T5 32watt 5000k daylight bulbs x8
I have UV resistant coated plexiglass 'windows' across the entire screen room, the same coin test PASSED with 4 hours of normal daylight passing through the windows.
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dbl post..
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Well after two weeks both LED light sources failed the coin test to a point. It appears around eight days the emulsion starts to cross link and by days 10-11 pretty much exposed. Going to see if I can find a UV meter to use and try some more experimenting.
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we found the same thing with LED's, while they say zero UV, they did expose a screen in about 5 hours. So we sleeved them and we haven't had any more issues...also, we turn them off when we aren't in there too.
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Well after two weeks both LED light sources failed the coin test to a point. It appears around eight days the emulsion starts to cross link and by days 10-11 pretty much exposed. Going to see if I can find a UV meter to use and try some more experimenting.
2 weeks, i'd say they passed.
I'm not worried about that many days of exposure as our screen turnover is about 2 days. I'm more worried about ambient light in the room causing problems with fine tonal detail on quick exposing polymer emulsion.
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We are in the same boat, most screens are through our screen room in less then three days if not sooner. Right now 6-8 hours, just long enough to dry before burning but do have a bunch that may sit for weeks like the 25, 60, 81, 305 and 355. That being said short of making another space just for the odd ball screens the bulbs I tested would not be usable. There are also many who may store screens for two weeks on average and was trying to make the test realistic across the board.
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There are also many who may store screens for two weeks on average and was trying to make the test realistic across the board.
I store some screens for weeks at a time, in a cabinet with a door/cover/tarp/curtain or whatever so light can't get in, as should everyone.