CMYK T Shirt Print-Screen Printing one rupee
Screen printing CMYK on white T shirts can produce results equal to that of any DTG printer, so at what point does it become impractical to create screens and put it on a digital printer? The print featured here was printed @ 85LPI using water based inks. We really should have timed the process to enable us to make comparisons, but unfortunately we forgot, timing jobs from start to finish is a very good practice to get into on multi colour set ups. A very rough estimate would be a couple of hours to produce screens, ten minute press set up, 30 minute press clean up and an hourly production rate of around 400 pieces.
Critical to making this process a competitive price on smaller print runs (I think 100+ T-shirts is where we can start to compete with DTG) is getting your separations and screen making process precise and repeatable, it is almost impossible to tell if you have a good print until you have run off the first T-shirt, if it has poor colour or unacceptable moire, you will be spending 30 minutes cleaning up your screens and squeegees before having to repeat the whole process again. (not having to clean up four sets of squeegees and flood bars is the best reason I can think of for converting to digital)
Accurate pre registration and a level press also make for much faster set up times. Once the screens are in place and you are happy with the result production is 10 x the speed of any DTG printer (if anyone wants to correct me on this wild guess feel free)
We recommend good quality T-shirts when printing at 85LPI, and the same is true for DTG printing. We find American apparel give excellent results, we were also very impressed with the bamboo/cotton mix T shirts we tried. Water based inks give a totally imperceptible hand and I think they also have some production benefits over plastisol for CMYK work. There are also environmental benefits. Grafco have formulated a water based binder especially for transparent process which we used here.
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Looks like the print results are pretty promising, certainly look great from here.
Do you think CMYK will hold up on designs where colour muddiness might become more apparent (which a dirty rupee might get away with)? Like a print of somebody’s face?
Not that I would encourage un-altered photographic stag-party-esque designs, but you know people love them.
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It is true of CMYK that colour range can be limited and other problems such as colour gain on press make this a less used method for printing clean graphics. A face would possibly be better off being produced using a simulated process separation, with 2 or three flesh coloured inks. However! we are optimistic about being able to use the true process method (CMYK) on a more regular basis. The simple reason being Newman frames are bringing all of the variables which contribute to this problem under control. I don’t think we would be looking at true process printing as seriously as we are without the introduction of Newman frames. We will more than likely run a clean graphic in the very near future where you will be able to judge for yourself.
Hi,
what brand of inks are you using for water-based CMYK? do you add a retarder? do you add water? what screen mesh are you using and what type of emulsion? what seperations software do you use?
thanks so much.
Hi Nigel, for this job we used Grafcos transparant process base. No retarders required. The emulsion was by KIWO it has amazing bridging properties and resistant to all waterbased inks and discharge, but unfortunately is very difficult to remove from screens when reclaiming. We use screen print separator for CMYK seps. works straight from the actions pallette, more often than not requires no tweaking. Hope this is helpful.
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