more steel mesh screen printing


steel mesh screen printing

Update: I’ve done some more experiments and pulled a bunch of prints. The technique works really well!


I had one bad screen where I rastered the image too many times and it ended up sort of bleeding, opening up the lines too wide. This was on 250×250 mesh, which I thought would be too fine. I think that the clear coat started to melt away a bit as the screen heated up. The metal threads are really, really thin. So I have a hunch that they got a bit hotter than on lower count screens and that fuzzed out the image.


The bad image gave me a chance to try re-using a screen. I simply sprayed more clearcoat over the existing image. I could still see the outlines of the previous image, but I could tell that all of the mesh was sealed up again. So the parts that had no image before now had a double layer of clear coat. That turned out not to be a problem.


I decided to use a faster speed and more power this time, and to just do one pass. So I set the speed to 200 (about 1/3 max speed, don’t ask why 200 = 1/3 max speed, it just does) and 40% power. It worked perfectly on one pass. The image I used isn’t super detailed, but it has both sections with some small details and large open sections. Both look good! It’s the tape deck graphic above, which is one of Neg-Fi’s logos.


I added a couple new images of onesies with ArtBots and Neg-Fi logos on them to the gallery.


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