Reclaiming Difficult Screens
Posted by Dwayne Collins - Outside Sales on 5/29/2014
Recently I had an opportunity to do a short video demonstrating a technique to clean very difficult screens. I thought I might follow up with some words and instructions to make it even easier.
The screens that we were using were taken from our washout booth that we use for our screen printing classes here at Texsource. There were being used in the filtration system for the booth, so as you might can imagine they were absolutely saturated with emulsion, ink, diazo, chemicals, and everything else you might can imagine going down that system. The screens were in a dual-layer configuration - one was on top of the other. Both of them had been covered to the point that water could no longer go through the screens. They were completely covered in this mess of chemicals - it is doubtful your shop would ever see screens in this condition (other than being used in a filtration system, of course).
I started by spraying a generous amount of Easiway EasiStrip on both the front and back of the screen, followed by a similar amount of Easiway 701. EasiStrip is primarily an emulsion remover, with 701 service as a haze remover and degreaser. Now in the video I spray and pretty much immediately spray with a pressure washer. As you can see, the screen came amazingly clean on first application. Ideally, I would have let the screen soak just a bit longer with my sprays - you would have seen even greater results; but we had great results either way.
As a follow up, I sprayed a small amount of each on the screen again and utilized a scrub brush briefly, then pressure washed again. As you can see, this screen came out looking like new. You could have easily went and dried the screen and used it on the press.
I have been asked how to get out 'impossible' stains on a screen. Well, as you can see these screens were in pretty bad shape. If you continue to have a problem area on your screen that seems to defy even this cleaning, try using a 50 cent piece-sized drop of Rhino HR2800 on the stain, following the directions on the carton. This is some of the strongest stuff that is made for stain removal and should be able to reclaim even the most difficult areas.
Now have a look at this video and see the difference the Easiway products made on both of the screens we cleaned - both in less that 5 minutes.
Texsource Screen Printing Supply
0 comments: