Alchemy Online - Screen Printing Deck Graphics

welcome back to another week of alchemy online this week we're going to be taking a look at how we use screen printing techniques to adhere graphics to our shop decks now there are a ton of different ways that you can take art that you've done art that exists in the world and put it on a skateboard today we're going to be specifically looking at screen printing to put our classic alchemy logo onto some of our shop decks if you're at home and you're making a single board for yourself we really recommend stencils are an ideal and cost-effective way to add graphics to boards if you haven't seen it we did an episode a while back that details some of the process of stencil making but today we have about 22 boards that we're going to be printing on and so stenciling is way more work than we want to use so we're going to dive in and look at all the tools and tips to screen print graphics onto your skateboard [Music] so before we start actually printing we're gonna take a quick look at the tools that we use in this process uh we use a traditional squeegee which has a urethane edge here that we use to push the ink through the screen we've got our speedball water-based ink because we like our planet and we don't want to kill it some classic painters tape uh an extra speedy clamp and then our rig here is a single color rig uh which means we can just do one color at a time and it's basically a hinged system with a magnet so we can lift our screen our platen has been modified to print skateboards essentially we have a center line and then i have marked two bolts here so that we can put our skateboards in the same place every time and then we have our screen so before we get into things it's important to mention that the majority of produced skateboards out there on the market use heat transfers to put the graphics on this is a great method for high numbers and full graphics that means nose to tail lots of color heat transfers are going to be the way to go since we are a small operation with small simple graphics we like doing it by hand and we're going to be using our classic alchemy screen modifying it just a little bit so that it prints nice on our deck and we're going to be doing about 22 boards today and we're going to number and sign each one of them and then they'll be available for people to buy skate and destroy so the very first thing we're going to do here to get this ready to print is we're going to use our painters tape and we're actually going to block out the word alchemy and boarding so that we have a nice centered graphic that just says escape tacoma this is again a silk screen essentially the way it works is we have very thin fibers of silk that are woven together basically creating a grid now there's a ton of different screens out there the higher the screen count the more detail you're going to get essentially i think about it like pixels or a bit rate the fewer mesh lines you have the bigger or blockier your image is going to come through the finer those little holes are you're going to get a lot more detail a lot more rounded surfaces shading things like that so we're going to go ahead again and use our painters tape to just block out the areas we don't want the ink to come through on our screen and we're going to go ahead and tape it from the back side so that as i'm printing my squeegee's not going to pull up any of that tape on us now that we've got our screen all taped it has a very inspiring message of the best place you could possibly skate we're going to go ahead and get our screen loaded up we're going to be putting the screen in sideways because we want a vertical graphic on our board let's run in this direction and you'll notice i've got several shims in here because we're printing on skateboards it's really important that we maintain a small degree of separation between the screen and the thing we're printing on it's called off contact so i can adjust the spacing to whatever it needs to be with these 10 little shims sweet i love it when it works the right way the first time sometimes you eyeball it and you get it perfect and you don't have to do any adjustments now that our system is all set up we've got our board registration right where we need it to be so every time we put a new skateboard in we're going to get the print in the same area we've adjusted for our clamp everything's ready to go so before we actually print the first step is getting ink on our screen and flooding our screen it's a really important step of the process we'll explain why essentially right now our screen is completely dry and so there's all those tiny little holes that we're going to be pushing this ink through to transfer our image we do not want to have to rely on the squeegee to push the ink into the screen and then transfer so a simple flood stroke we don't need a lot of pressure at all we're going to take our squeegee and just gently pull it across the screen and what this has done now is it is loaded all of those tiny holes in between the mesh with our ink so when we're actually printing all we're doing is transferring our ink from the pre-loaded screen onto the deck below every time we print when we lift the screen we give it another flood stroke so that it's ready it also prevents our screen from drying out because this is a water-based ink if we left this unattended for too long the ink would actually dry in the screen there are chemicals and solvents to help get it out of there but sometimes if you wait too long and leave your ink in you can potentially ruin that screen so always flood your screen so after we gone ahead and we added some extra shim material to the bottom of our screen giving us the proper clearance for our off contact our screen is no longer pulling up that ink and we're getting nice clean uniform prints so now we just have to do it 21 more times so what can happen it often does as you're printing is you might experience some blowout that we mentioned before and essentially that's getting ink where we don't want ink and what happens a lot of times is we get too much ink buildup pushing through the screen it comes through on the bottom side and starts transferring onto our board so one of the easiest ways to go about fixing that instead of rinsing the whole screen out and starting over from scratch we're going to load up a board pretending we're going to print as usual and before we actually go ahead and print a blown out image on the skateboard i'm actually going to just take some scrap paper we're going to lay it down and we're going to do an extra hard print on this so hopefully that extra ink that's built up on the underside of our screen is going to transfer onto our paper kind of restoring us back to our natural state we can keep so we've gone ahead and we got our run all printed and now we're gonna talk a little bit about finishing steps because this ink has to dry and we like to put an additional layer of clear coat over to help that graphic last a little bit longer as you're beating it up out in the street so let's grab one of these guys and we'll take a look all of these decks are still wet to the touch i could definitely completely smear it so make sure you have a nice spot you can set things aside to dry if you're printing on garments you're going to want to absolutely heat set this ink so that it's ingrained into the fabric that you're printing on for our skateboards though we're going to let them air dry about 24 hours so that they are dry to the touch and again we're going to come in with a polyurethane in a can and we're going to give it uh one to three layers of clear coat so that we're sealing that graphic in it's going to result in uh more smudges than chipping no one likes a graphic that flakes out so that's how we finish our boards in-house you can definitely run these under a heat gun a hair dryer if you need to there's all kinds of heating equipment out there for industrial screen printing but again we're going to let them air dry put a little clear coat on it and then since these are small batches and they're hand done we're going to go in after the fact and number them 1 through 22 and date them so we know when we produce this graphic and they're really fun when they surface years later someone will bring in a beat-up board and i can look at the number figure out when it's from so that's going to be a wrap for this week's board printing

Channel: Alchemy Skateboarding

Views: 9,405

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Id: a1P0kIwpHEo

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021