How to Screen Print Nylon Part 2. Some Instructions. Mostly Warnings.

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