NHS Distribution Tour - Printing Graphics

what's up guys Dylan will skate warehouse we just rolled into Santa Cruz California and we're here at NHS distribution home of Santa Cruz skateboards Kreacher skateboards independant mob just to name a few we're going to get a tour of the facility and the NHS Museum so let's go take a look around first section of our NHS tour we were led by Dave real through their manufacturing facility we got an inside look into the screen printing process and we learned a lot of history along the way so what we have here is this is the dart this is the darkroom where we cut all of our screens for NHS manufacturing this right here is just a regular manuals or a automated screen sorry when we cut screens we use a film you use a photo synthesis material you shoot it the light shoots the material the screen the material then bakes then you spray out wherever the artwork was so at that point you have the window where your ink would come through piece of artwork would be simple something like this so again the light would shoot anywhere that you see the art would actually not light wouldn't penetrate through then the water would solu late and wash it out so then you'd have your window for screen printing we've got these kind of machines we've got metal plates with the polymeric lachey on it that's what this red material is it is simulates what you saw as far as on a silkscreen the other material it's a photo synthesis material the problem is is you don't have a window so what you have to do is you have to first do the artwork like you normally would with the solid then you have to come back and put a dot pattern and in this situation we put like a 360 dots per square inch on there and what that does it turns it all into a dot pattern so it's no longer a solid what happens on the printing press is it's got dot game so by breaking it all down by DA then bring it over here what this plate would do is it would pop on top of here we'd slide it into here now the machine would move we have cups like this these cups hold the ink inside with a razor blade and magnets around it to keep it nice and firm it's got this post boom it would stick down on it so then your inkwell would move back and forth when your inkwell moves out of the way your daughter then becomes in front of it when it picks it up it gets a dot gain so what I mean by that is all the little dots gain into one solid so by the time it comes back and prints on the wheel it's a solid form so that's how we're recreating the mesh of a silkscreen but yet on a plate it's pretty wild right this machine wasn't originally made for wheel printing this is how they print golf balls and CDs and stuff like that so it's all been custom made this thing moves around this is called a Caray we've done individual special jigs to print trucks on here as well we printed golf balls we printed baseballs and printed mine scopes whatever we can do when we're trying to look for more money these things can actually create more work in the environment if you were to go up here yeah here's how a wheel would pop on here is the actual graphic so as you can see it's a nice solid the lines are all clean and solid the orange is solid but actually on the plate again it was a dot pattern so it's all dot game another one of the processes that you guys are going to see is that we do a heat transfer process it kind of took over a lot of the hand printed skateboarding if you will it's a little bit cost efficient when you do heat transferring and it's also you can manage your inventory better so what I mean by that is when you print by hand you could be stuck printing seven hundred to a thousand of a run because you got to go color to color to color to color whereas the heat transferring you can order a thousand heat transfers and just make a hundred boards sell the boards make another hundred board and so that you can control it better you're not stuck with a lemon so to speak or a slow-moving board you put 750 in inventory that might be years worth of inventory and that's not really what we're looking for so here is a heat transfer machine this machine is cooling off right now I'm sorry he just finished his run so we're kind of in the middle of it but you can see right here here's the roller what you have is you have halt heating elements around it the transfers roll through on a plastic carrier so what I mean by that is that the ink is on this plastic material but it's actually held by like a dyeing level you see how my hair static the dyeing level on here is a static measurement it's usually around 12 and what it does is it doesn't allow the ink to stick to the plastic so it's floating but the plastic is just a carrier to get it here also the plastic allows you to print on flat stock presses so the colera T of the heat transfer is way more tangible at that point because you don't have to print with the bends of the skateboard and with the contour to where it gives the chance for all these little lines to blend and bleed and move around so you print it on a flat stock press you have it in a lineup of three that cut them spring them here we would heat transfer as need be the ink ends up on the board but the plastic is thrown away people seem to think for some reason that when they see he transferred they think we're putting plastic on skateboards and super important for people to know that it's just another way of applying ink to a skateboard there's only ink on this floor the thing that makes it successful other than the temperature and the roller is that the white ink at the end of this transfer has glue in it that is a heat sensitive glue so this glue reacts to the finish of the skateboard they emboss together the plastic peels off and gets thrown away you clean the edges and you have a perfect skateboard we can make about 70 an hour off of this thing finished so when we're talking about heat transferring you can see the simplicity and it's one Operator system and they can roll the boards this is what in the 80s and 90s was developed and what we had to tolerate when we were printing by hand you can imagine all the time that went inventing these when I first discovered this and this still registers really well the screens are very tight we didn't let anybody see these for like ten years we didn't want anybody to know about these screens we want them to know about the technology we didn't want them to see what could actually be done to help printing that much clearer so when you see all the bitchin stuff at the beginning of the 90s as well this it was all done on these bent frames we went through a small stage where the tables were actually hydraulic instead so what I mean by that is this right here is a jig for a skateboard to go on and what we originally thought because we originally had flat screens is that we would just have the jig draw so I would hit a air pedal with my foot the screen would drop down that's why there's a window right here because the shock used to pull down right there and the tail would be mounted up a little higher on a bearing and then it was this screen would be flat and as I would screen my foot would come off and the nose would come up what happened there was the graphic grew a quarter of an inch because the board slides when it comes up we're actually making the graphic longer than it originally is so Jimmy had to go back to the drawing board and make the graphics smaller so then when I printed them they would grow bigger so now you can imagine the stress on registration got really crazy in the late 80s Early 90s there was a lot of blemishes and imperfections and stuff but people just kind of rode with it it was okay for me it's as simple as three colors or less here is as affordable as doing a five six color heat transfer so we'll try and fight to keep the hand printed stuff around two and three color decks and we'll do them at home just fine with one guy doing all the colors as opposed to when we get into some difficult stuff we'll just go to the heat transfer and they kind of weigh each other out this table itself I made this table in like 1985 it's printed well over three million skateboards when you see these ink colors over here this is all inks from my Grasso's Roscoe everything from back in the day this tables been through all three journeys and what I mean by that is by the original first hand screens to the hydraulic screens now to a bent frame the most important thing that happens in screen printing is off contact it's very important when you're screening something that as you screen the screen is lifting up behind the squeegee so that it would not make a blemish in which case if you were to see screening like this the screen to be lifting up a tiny bit behind you and at that point you can see how important it is for the screen to actually follow the skateboard and stay within a quarter of an inch of itself to make it as clear as you possibly could now the other difficulty comes when people are screen printing if they lean over here if they lean over here it actually changes the match the registration so when you have multiple guys working together I could be screening one way and then the next guy could be screening a little pushing on his left arm be a little sore or something and here's that registration is going to go off so sometimes people ask well if you're going to do a two and three colors skateboard by hand why don't you have two or three guys do it together it's easier for this one guy because he'll pull the same and then the next color he'll pull the same again so at that point his registration has a better chance of being perfect also one of the nicest things about printing by hand now is that everything is water-based so back in the 80s and the early 90s we're getting really high a lot of lacquer fumes things coming in and out of heaters all the time steam coming off these boards you wouldn't believe it's like you can see yourself running around on the screen you're so loaded sometimes you know you have to almost go to lunch and get drunk to be normal again you know good have a pizza and a pitcher of beer come back to work and you're saying again for at least a half hour and then fumes get back after you and you're done but with the water-based ink you never smell anything it doesn't do anything it's water-soluble with water wash up clean up we don't need lacquer thinner we don't need anything so that's like the greatest thing about it on the other side of it when you do heat transfers you're using UV and you vegans dry by a lamp so it's going incredibly fast on a mated pres it's just being printed then it's going through a lamp and then it's being printed and going so UV ink works really well for that and for the speed accuracy and also it's a really good slipper you know that the ink is UV ink is really slippery one of the things that I think people misunderstand is that the thickness of ink when you use UV inks you can print like the thickness of your hair so five colors on a heat transfer could feel like one or two colors by hand so there's where you get that imperfection Nisour some skaters will say a hand printed board slides way better well it's because it's got like two heat transfers thickness on it instead of one so again this is all made in-house these frames were made at the skateboard shop the factory itself in Wisconsin and then brought out here and then I stretched them here so it's all private personal stuff total custom made

Channel: Skate Warehouse

Views: 173,912

Rating: 4.9568033 out of 5

Keywords: Skateboarding (Sport), Skate, go skate, skate warehouse, skateboards, skateboard, Skateboard (Sports Equipment), SW videos, California, NHS Inc. (Business Operation), Dave Freil, Santa Cruz (City/Town/Village), Santa Cruz Skateboards, Creature Skateboards, Independent Truck Company (Business Operation), Krux Trucks, Flip Skateboards (Business Operation), Ricta Wheels, MOB Grip, Strange Notes, Screenprinting, Deck Graphics, Jeff Kendall, Rob Roskopp, OJ Wheels, Dylan J Harris

Id: ui1ZH6keYQM

Length: 12min 18sec (738 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 12 2015