Software to create decals

[MarkII]

Your not supposed to take a bath in it...

I know, I know... But it's hard to avoid when you have to soak a big wad of rags with the solvent and use it to swab down the screen. The solvent doesn't remove the ink, it just thins it out. So you have to keep repeatedly soaking the rags and applying more while your brain melts from the fumes. (After the first week, I couldn't smell the fumes anymore. ) And you have to work fast, too because a) you need to get every speck of ink out of the screen and the stencil before it dries, and after having printed with it for the past 3 hours, it is pretty close to dry, and b) there is much, much more work to do! And also, you are pretty exhausted from wielding that squeegee for those three hours, on top of loading in the sheets and then removing the prints and placing them on the drying racks as fast as you can, you are groggy from the fumes, and you are rushing through the clean-up, so you get sloppy. Real sloppy. The only thing that is not covered with ink and solvent when you are done is the screen. Some of what was on the screen is now on the rags, more of it is in puddles in the drain gutter in the floor, and by far the greatest amount of it is on you.

Doing the big screens is really hard work...

We attached the big squeegee to a boom that slid down a track attached to the other side of the table from where I stood. The boom was also hinged at its attachment to the track, so that it could be lifted up without coming out of the track. On my end of the boom was a big handle; on the other end was a large, heavy counterweight. The counterweight, which appeared to have been made from a large paint pail filled with concrete, applied pressure to the far end of the squeegee during the pull while I applied pressure to my end. When I let go of the boom handle, the counterweight lifted the squeegee up so that it was off the screen, just as it should be. The screen was attached to a hinge on the far side of the table, just under the boom track, so that after a pull, I lifted the screen up from my side and swung down a prop attached to the lower end of the screen, so that I could remove the print. The whole process involved pulling a large sheet of stock off of a pile next to the table, sliding it onto the table and up to the registration guides, lowering the screen part way, pulling down the boom (lifting about 40 lbs. of counterweight in the process) and dragging ink up the screen to prime it, then lowering the screen all the way down and pulling the squeegee back down the screen while applying downward pressure on it to push the ink through the stencil and onto the paper, easing the boom back up (I couldn't just let go of it, because it would bounce up and splash ink all over everything), lifting and propping up the screen, removing the print and placing it on a drying rack. The table that this was done on was about 6.5 feet wide and 10 or 11 feet long, so priming the screen and pulling the print required some walking. The whole sequence of priming the screen and pulling the print bore an uncanny resemblance to pulling an oar on a Roman trireme, just like it is depicted in Ben Hur. Add to that the fact that once you start, you cannot stop until the job is completed; you have to keep pulling prints so that the screen doesn't dry out, so you might as well be chained to that oar, errr, I mean, squeegee boom.

Yeah, it was hard work. But it was also the greatest upper body workout that I ever got. After only a couple of months of doing that, I was never so strong in all of my life. :bangbang:

MarkII