You’ll want the inkless side of your film touching the emulsion when you burn your image. So, depending on the position from which your light source exposes your screen, i.e. from above or below, you may have to reverse the image before printing. This is because when the ink on your film heats up it tends to stick to the emulsion. It washes off in the rinse process, but it ruins your film.

Time to Print

In the print dialog don’t do anything fancy. Continue reading →

What You’ll Need for No-RIP screen printing Film

You’re gonna need some supplies and equipment to do this. But it must meet the criteria of being cheap, effective, and simple. Continue reading →

The setup comes in two parts. Artwork, and the actual printing process. So we’ll start with the obvious first.

DO NOT SEPARATE YOUR ARTWORK INTO SPOT COLORS. USE A RICH BLACK PROCESS INSTEAD.

Whether printing on paper, or on a t-shirt, the success of your spot color work depends a lot on how you setup your black images. All film, regardless of the final, printed color, must first be put to film as a solid black image. When you send your spot colors through a RIP, which is controlled by a postscript driver, all color information except black is automatically removed.

We don’t want a SPOT COLOR. Instead, we want a RICH BLACK process color. If you have more than one color, and they touch, you may have to set your colors up up on different layers for ease of use. In Illustrator or Corel, open up the respective color control pallet, and slide all colors CYMK, to 100%. We want our Epson Inkjet printer to open up the floodgates of each cartridge and lay a good layer of ink. If you’re printing from Photoshop, just make sure your image is setup in RGB mode, and that you’re blacks are the deepest, richest black you can find on your color picker.

In Illustrator, your color will look like this:

This is how it will look in Photoshop:

Close-up of the Photoshop Color Picker:

When I first bought my R1800 printer with FastRIP I paid approximately $1200.00 for it, with financing interest more like $4,500.00. *Cough*. I was told by my vendor that you cannot achieve a good enough black image without a RIP, which lays down enough of a “special” ink to completely block the UV light during exposure. As it turns out, I was either mislead, i.e. sold, or I was dealing with someone who didn’t have all the information.

Not only can you get clean, crisp images with excellent UV blockage, but you can do it without using the overpriced “special” ink!

More on halftones and spots later. Let’s talk about RIP software. RIPs are the same in any printing industry. They typically serve their purpose very well, but are extra-ordinarily overpriced. Very basically, without a detailed explanation, they take your image and run it through a process of extremely high resolution, which is then typically burned to some type of film. There are also photo-rips which serve the same purpose, but he end result is that a full color image is printed.

The same holds true for the screen printing industry. We have our own RIPS, many of which work amiably, but are either overpriced, overfeatured, or ridiculously complex. As in a lot of other industries, many of them require dongles, which can fail (like mine eventually did), or are just so bloated that it takes as many process cycles to keep them open, as it does for them to process an image.

PowerRIP is probably the cheapest coming in at $399 just for the software. However, for me the interface is a more confusing than is necessary. So it may be cheaper than most, and produce fine quality - but it isn’t bonehead proof, and it doesn’t come right out of the box ready to go. It will take quite a bit of getting used to. Probably the greatest thing about PowerRIP is the enormous selection of printers to choose from. You can use nearly any Epson Printer from the C-120 on up. If you get an R1400, which is Epson’s replacement for the 1280 series, you’ll be coming in at around $700.00.

I purchased my RIP combo, an R1800 with FastRIP for $1200. Up to now it has been a nightmare, and probably the most inconsistent tool I purchased from Ryonet. As a matter of fact they’ve all but shifted the attention off of the FastRIP combo, directly onto another option which I will talk about in a later paragraph. The problems with my setup start with the R1800. For starters it’s an ink hog. Which, actually, is about the only bad thing I can say for it. The images are magnificent. It just isn’t a very economical printer as far ink goes.

Enter FastRIP with the proprietary FastINK, which is supposedly black enough to block out the UV light. I don’t have enough bad to say about FastRIP, and FastINK, so I’ll just narrow the list down to a few fundamental complaints. First off, the FastINK causes banding throughout the image. Which shows up on the burned screen. This problem would reoccur no matter how much tech support I received, which they were very helpful. I have nothing bad to say about the company. They always returned the calls, and stayed on the line until the problem was solved.

Sometimes FastRIP worked, and when it did the results were great. But it was never consistently dependable. Worse, if the printer sat untouched for a week or so, the FastINK would gum up the print head requiring two or three headcleanings to clear. Not good.

I eventually upgraded the FastRIP to AccuRIP, which is hands down, the simplest, best RIP software that I have used. Probably the most impressive thing about AccuRIP is that it has the ability to print FM dots, i.e. stachastic dots as well as halftones.

Stochastic dots print much, much clearer than halftones, and make for a much finer image without the worry of moire’ patterns. They take a little (or a lot) of getting used to if you’ve been printing halftones, but once you get the hang of it, the results are outstanding.

There’s only one other piece of T-shirt software which does FM dots, and it’s a photoshop plugin from Squaredot.com. My problem with them is that you can’t even download a trial version to check it out. They’re so tight about keeping the software unpirated that they won’t even let you see the user interface. Myself, if I’m paying $800.00 for something, ($2,400 after we apply my business skills to it), I want to see it in action.

So, for me, AccuRIP serves amiably, and makes beautiful image-setter quality film. It has no dongle. Has an extremely small hard drive footprint at 48 megs, and it does the raster process outside of the print driver, so it will work with ANY printer!

That said, AccuRIP, for the new, spot color screen printer, is the best value. The price is $499.00 for the software. Ryonet is offering a RIP combo package of the R1400 with a copy of AccuRIP for about $1050.

There is an alternative. If waiting for your vendor to show you a cheaper, more reasonable idea - you’ll be pissing and moaning about it on your death bed, when you’re old and gray because it ain’t gonna happen.

That’s coming up in Part 2.

If you haven’t read Part 1 You’ll have to Read it now or you won’t know what I’m talking about.

For a few people the road seems to be an easy road to follow. Successive victories get built up on top of one another until they stand atop the mountain waiting for the upstarts to charge up and knock them off. For others, most in fact, the road to success is paved with failure after failure, but tempered with dogged persistence. For some… it isn’t even paved. It’s not even really a gravel or dirt road. It would barely pass as a deer trail, and even then, most of the deer on this path have already been eaten. That is my road. It isn’t boring. It’s frustrating, it’s mind numbing in its strangeness, but unfortunately, not boring.

All the things my expert didn’t do, which she should have.

1.) Preshrink your nylon. Nylon shrinks when heated up to around 230 degrees. It shrinks a lot. Some estimates say that it might shrink as much as 20%, but I think that’s overstating it. It’s probably more like 5%, which is still a lot when you’re trying to register artwork. So, first things first. Pre-shrink your nylon. Even if you’ve ordered preshrunk. Send it through your conveyor at least once. Twice for posterity. Let it cool down, and then print it.

2.) Nylon Additive must be used. Nylon and other mesh substrates like rayon, burn up very easily. They will burn under a flash dryer after about 25 seconds. That’s not enough time to cure ink. If the Nylon begins to shrivel it’s over. That’s it. Once it starts it melts fast and there’s no saving it.

You must have an additive in your ink to make it cure faster, and Nylabond (or similar additive) will do the trick. But, be warned, once the agent s mixed in the ink is ruined. You can only use it for nylon products, and nothing else. Mix the ink and additive in parts in a separate container if you want to preserve the rest of your ink. Ryonet also sells a great kit for this. It’s a quart of ink with just the right amount of Nylon bonding agent to get the job done.

2.) Special care must be taken with setting up the screens and artwork if you’re printing multiple colors on darks. When printing color onto dark T-shirts, typically you have to have a white flash plate underneath the color so that it will show up. However, due to the nature of nylon this is a bad idea. You have to flash the white ink so that it can be printed, and even preshrunk ink can still shrink more when its reheated. In other words if you use a white flash plate on dark nylon, YOU WILL LOSE REGISTRATION.

Set up your screens for dark nylon like this instead. The artwork should be set up so that none of the colors touch. This way you can print each color successively BEFORE it’s reheated. This will keep any residual shrinkage uniform across the printed artwork.

3.) Special Care must be taken when printing the ink onto the nylon. Ryonet has a crazy suggestion for how to screen print nylon. They suggest using very light squeegee pressure even though you don’t actually get much ink onto the jackets on the first pass, then flash the ink and print another thin layer. Do this over and over, with very brief flash times, until you the vibrant image you need.

I tested this out, and it works, pretty well. Truth be told it works about the best of any method I tried for small print runs. The problem comes when you have a large order. If you’re using metal jacket clamp as your platen, it retains the heat from flashing, and gets hotter with each successive print. Eventually, even if you have multiple platens, it may start to cure your catalyzed ink in the screen, since it now cures much more quickly than regular ink. It may also facilitate jacket shrinkage, even if it has been preshrunk.

Should I print nylon at all? Sure! Nylon jackets are very lucrative, and your markup on them is significantly more than what you’ll make on T-shirts. But, every article I write here is geared toward helping new printers avoid making the mistakes that I did. So, do not take nylon jobs UNTIL YOU ARE COMFORTABLE SCREEN PRINTING ON NYLON.

My suggestion is to make a circuit trip around all of your thrift stores, and buy any and every scrap nylon jacket you can afford. Get a few screens and start practicing. Ruin a few of them on purpose to learn how long you can flash nylon before it burns. After the ink is cured, let it cool down, and then see how easy it is to peel off the jacket. It should be difficult. Wash the jackets after they’ve cooled down, to see if they’ve lost any of their body. They shouldn’t be any easier to peel off than before.

Don’t do what I did. Don’t see the dollar signs, take the job, and create an unhappy customer. In the end you’ll be glad you didn’t.

Here are some more informative links on printing nylon than this simple article:

• Ryonet’s Tutorial
• International Coatings Mesh and Printing Tutorial
• US Screen Printers Tutorial