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cyrano

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Youtube account Applied Science has figured out DIY screen printing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS8Q9LUIKA8

As usual, he's very thorough. After a lot of experimenting, he came up with the right method. Seems affordable and easy enough to make your own face plates. And that's still the most expensive part of any diy project if you send it out.

What do you think?
 
Great video.
My experience with screen printing is from an art/illustration background,  I still learned a couple things from this.
The sheet emulsion is really great, gotta try it out one day.
I had good experience with standard acrylic painting colours with added substance for slowing down drying (not to permanently clog the screen)

And it requires a little practice, don´t expect the first couple of prints to be ok :mad: ;D
 
Back in the 70s/80s I did my own screen printing for prototypes, but you can actually pay vendors to do that for production quantities.

One old trick to save scrap during set up is to cover the work piece with a layer of clear 3"-4" wide label tape... Hit it with the ink screen and if off-registration just replace the clear tape and try again, until you get it right... better than wasting good metal during setup.

JR

PS: I'm so old I remember using sunlight to expose the UV sensitive media...  ;D
 
I used to do a lot of screen printing. I bought a VHS tape called "The Screen Printing Class" or something like that back in the 90s. Built a big, wooden platen and used pre-made frames from Michaels to stretch the screens onto. The sheet emulsions were great.

I find it much quicker, easier and cleaner to create vector graphics files in Inkscape and use laser engraving these days.  We have three 130W engravers at the local makerspace that'll do a nice job on even cold rolled steel faceplates, etc. With more and more community makerspaces popping up (not to mention your local community colleges), powerful laser engravers are available to lots of folks today.  And for vector graphics creation, Inkscape is Open Source and free.

BT
 
I did 4 years of screenprinting classes in high school and college

What I have come to believe is that it tends to be messy and toxic to the point of not being something I’d do at home. If I had a garage with a sink that I didn’t care about maybe, but at my apartment definitely no. I’m not sure how good it is to wash those chemicals down the drain either from an environmental perspective.

I didn’t watch the whole video so I probably shouldn’t have even said anything. Maybe the guy has an ink that’s really non toxic and easy to clean, the skeptical part of me would assume that would be an inferior product if true
 
Applied Science is a remarkable guy. He seems to produce a lot of stuff that's very hard to do for average folk.

In general he seems aware of ecological stuff, but he's in the US, so there are hardly any limits about sewage.

That said, I've already abandoned the idea myself, as it's too messy for the one or two times a year I'd use it. I just found it because I was looking for ways to restore the front of an old mixer.

And I'm a big fan of his vids. The guy knows what he's doing... :D
 
cyrano said:
Applied Science is a remarkable guy. He seems to produce a lot of stuff that's very hard to do for average folk.

In general he seems aware of ecological stuff, but he's in the US, so there are hardly any limits about sewage.
in fact I am pretty sure the regulations are about what comes out of the sewage treatment plants and back into ground water.

I was surprised to read published advice (from my state government) advising to pour used antifreeze down into the sewer instead of just discard it on the ground. Apparently sewage treatment can handle antifreeze, but not waste oil and I doubt paint. Of course this does not apply to homes with septic tanks, or outhouses.  :eek:

JR


That said, I've already abandoned the idea myself, as it's too messy for the one or two times a year I'd use it. I just found it because I was looking for ways to restore the front of an old mixer.

And I'm a big fan of his vids. The guy knows what he's doing... :D
 
JohnRoberts said:
in fact I am pretty sure the regulations are about what comes out of the sewage treatment plants and back into ground water.

Oh, John, don't get me started.

There are regulations in a lot of places in the USA, but not everywhere. And that's the crux of the problem.

Treated sewage is usually going into surface water, not ground water. So it crosses borders.

And another gotcha is that large cities, like New York, just export their waste to areas where regulations are weak, or non-existent. And from there, waste is exported to Africa, Asia, or South America. I don't think sewage gets exported, but there sure are sewage tubes to other counties if the rules in these counties are less strict.

Until recently, waste paid 6$ a ton for export. Because more and more nations (China, Indonesia, India...) now have strong restrictions about importing waste, US communities will have to pay from 60$ to 90$ per ton for incineration or disposal. That's a BIG problem.

In fact, the EPA has been effectively neutered. The current head is a former industry lobbyist.

I was surprised to read published advice (from my state government) advising to pour used antifreeze down into the sewer instead of just discard it on the ground. Apparently sewage treatment can handle antifreeze, but not waste oil and I doubt paint. Of course this does not apply to homes with septic tanks, or outhouses.  :eek:

Antifreeze is glycol. Easily treated with bacteria. Motor oil is mineral or synthetic. Poison for bacteria and most other life forms, including humans. Still, in Europe, glycol is recycled.

It's really amazing how the culture from English speaking nations is able to deny problems. A few examples:

The Romans knew lead was poisonous. The Germans stopped using lead in food processing in the 16th century. The UK stopped doing that in the 20th century.

In Victorian England, a lot of wallpaper contained lots of arsenic. Tens of thousands of people died because of it. Germany abandoned the use of arsenic based pigment in the 19th century. The UK did that in 1970, despite Queen Victoria campaigning for legislation a century before.

The list is endless...

That's not to say the rest of Europe doesn't have any eco problems. But it's on a very much reduced scale. Germany, fi, is still exporting used defective fridges and freezers to Africa, despite of the EU and German laws that prohibit that.

The trick is that they get exported as "working" 2nd hand, some packed in 2nd hand cars. In Africa, the gases are released into the atmosphere and the rest is scrapped. Isolation is burned. Cheaper than real recycling. Of course, shipping those adds to the ecological cost...
 
Yeah...

Sorry, John. Didn't mean too. It's just all around. Was just watching a vid about glass-fiber reinforced polyester. The guy knows what he's talkin' about.

Only, he's using ethyl methyl ketone (MEK) as a solvent. Without a mask or even simple aeration. He's a pro and he'll be dead in 20 years...
 
cyrano said:
Only, he's using ethyl methyl ketone (MEK) as a solvent. Without a mask or even simple aeration. He's a pro and he'll be dead in 20 years...

In regards to actual stripping....I still have a bunch of MEK left over from an attempt to strip some solvent sealer from some concrete.... I did a test spot and it really didn't work that great. Smelled like a million nail salons.... I tried that Citrustrip? sp? stuff and covered it with plastic for a bit.........Came off like butter......

I've used it to strip fiberglass doors before re-gelling and it's really amazing stuff.... I have not found anything yet it hasn't worked on for me....... it did stop at some 2k primer when I stripped some wheels once though......

Supposed to be biodegradable?? it does smell nice........
 
Yeah I used citrustrip to strip a partcaster neck that I wasn’t happy with.

It’s a great product, but I screwed up and melted the dot inlays on the side of the neck. The inlays on the fretboard were a different material and didn’t melt. Oh well, it’s easy enough to redo the side inlays

That citrustrip stuff is surprisingly powerful though. The only complaints I’ve got after my experiments are that it seems to be suspended in water so it causes wood to swell and it can leave some staining on light colored wood like maple.
 
cyrano said:
Yeah...

Sorry, John. Didn't mean too. It's just all around. Was just watching a vid about glass-fiber reinforced polyester. The guy knows what he's talkin' about.

Only, he's using ethyl methyl ketone (MEK) as a solvent Without a mask or even simple aeration. He's a pro and he'll be dead in 20 years...
I've inhaled my share of MEK and perhaps worse... 70 YO and not dead yet. 

I remember as a kid working with my older brothers on cars. We had a super strong solvent, I don't know the real name but we called it navy-42. I recall once my brother put an aluminum part in it to strip the paint off it and the next morning the aluminum part was dissolved. ::) ::)

JR
 
Yes, John, that's what the Marlboro man said too.  ::)

You really can't avoid it. Here I was, reading about Brexit and what pops up?

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/revealed-dirty-secrets-of-dup-s-dark-money-brexit-donor/

It seems the 435.000 £ that brexiteers received from George Soros was channelled through Richard Cook,  a waste baron. He made big bucks shipping waste from the USA to all over the world. He also left the shipping company holding the bill when the deal went sour...
 
cyrano said:
Yes, John, that's what the Marlboro man said too.  ::)
you can't avoid paying taxes and dying...

I do not smoke, buried one brother, one sister, one father, and a couple cousins with cancer... they all smoked. I am old but not stupid.

You really can't avoid it. Here I was, reading about Brexit and what pops up?

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/revealed-dirty-secrets-of-dup-s-dark-money-brexit-donor/

It seems the 435.000 £ that brexiteers received from George Soros was channelled through Richard Cook,  a waste baron. He made big bucks shipping waste from the USA to all over the world. He also left the shipping company holding the bill when the deal went sour...
My apologies to the list for triggering this detritus.

JR
 

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