Drying and Curing Inks DIY Style

We started our operation on a small budget. A really small budget. We bought our no frills 4 color press for around $500 (new, off of ebay), bought some shirts and basic supplies and that was pretty much it. We scrounged and made do with everything else for a while. And we used a heat gun to cure the discharge and water-based inks. We also used the heat gun the couple of times we tried using plastisol inks. It worked, but with a few failures. Here’s what we used to do:

You can only cure a small area at a time with a heat gun, 5 or 6 inches around maybe. The discharge ink needs to be cured 30 - 45 seconds, until it changes color. Before it dries. So it was a problem because the t-shirts get screened faster than you can cure the shirts. We dealt with that problem by doing small runs of shirts. A normal run for us was 20-30 shirts. It was less of a problem on smaller designs, a big problem on large ones.

No Problem

Problem

Our heat gun curing station was pretty funny. We used a foil steamtable warming tray turned upside down on its wire frame. Hey, it worked and it was free. We never caught one single thing on fire. Singed a shirt once, but everyone does that.

We tried doing plastisol on some shirts and tried all the tricks the videos said to tell if the ink was cured. The plastisol ink is supposed to cure for 45 seconds at 320-350 degrees. I would measure the temperature to get my distance right, controlling the heat on the shirt by the distance of the gun from the shirt (about 4 or 5 inches away to get 340-ish degrees) and count to 45 while curing a little area. Crazy, huh? Most of the shirts were ok, but we had a couple of them where the design was damaged when washed. I supposed it hadn’t been cured enough. And some we overcooked and the design got weird looking and too shiny in spots. So the heat gun is tricky with plastisol ink, in our experience. Larger designs are really hard. With the discharge ink, at least you can tell when it’s cured... it turns a lighter color as it discharges the color from the shirt.

We really needed to get a forced-air flash dryer to take our business to the next level, but that was a distant dream since they are quite expensive. I wrote about it on the Deaths Head blog back in 2009.

We kept saving up, even as we went through some tough economic times, and I kept searching for any reasonable solution. I called manufacturers and spoke to sales reps about flash dryers to learn as much as I could about the equipment out there. You can read a lot, but sometimes you have questions that only an expert can answer.

So I finally found a less expensive forced air flash unit, the Ranar DA-1616 that seemed like it would work for us. It had what we needed for discharge inks:
- Forced air
- 16 x 16 inch coverage (we do larger prints, but we can move them around)
- Infrared heat source (a better option than heat coils)
- A 110 volt plug! (the only one I could find at the time that had this)

The thing that worried me was that no matter how hard I searched on the web, I couldn’t find any first hand information about the unit. I asked on forums like gigposters.com and t-shirtforums.com but no one knew anything about the Ranar dryer. Which worried me a little. One of our suppliers, Pocono Screen Supply sold these dryers, so I called them for information. They really didn’t tell me much more than what it said on the web sites I had found, but I decided that because of the price difference this was the unit we would get. Sold here.

The day finally came when we had enough money to order the unit! Waiting for it to come was agony! We ordered it right before Christmas 2009 and the company was closed for the holidays and didn’t ship it until almost the middle of January. So when it came, we were jumping around for joy! We hauled it to the studio and unpacked it and gazed in wonder at the mysterious looking plug. What was this?

We had never seen this kind of plug. My first thought was that they had sent us the wrong unit and it was a 220 volt instead. I called the company and they checked with Ranar and, no, it was the right unit, a 110 volt. But it was a 20 AMP unit. Most circuit breakers are 15 AMP. The circuit breakers in our studio were 15 AMP as it happened. Heck, we replaced the wall socket with the correct socket for that plug and tried it anyway. We wanted that flash dryer baaad. It blew the fuse. Again and again. There was no way. We looked into changing the fuse to a 20 AMP. There was no master cut off switch on that fuse box. We couldn’t find out where to shut off the main power to the studio. So the power couldn’t be cut off to the fuses and I wasn’t going to let Freddy try to hot swap a fuse in a live box. Damn. So what were we to do?

What else could we do? We looked for a new studio.

For a long time we had talked about finding a live/work space. We had started out in the shared basement of Freddy’s apartment building, but the landlord told us he didn’t want us screen printing down there. We did it secretly for a while, anyway. But hiding everything all the time was a huge pain. We tried screen printing inside Freddy’s tiny apartment. We even tried my apartment in Brooklyn. None of these were solutions. One day our wonderful friends from the band The Saints of Pain generously offered to share their rehearsal space with us and we set up our beautiful new studio in the rooms in the back of the space they rented. But there were water and power problems with the building. So, I gave up my apartment of 26 years in the beautiful, historic Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn (sigh) and moved in with Freddy to save money. We needed to find a new place to work. And live. We really needed that to be the same place. It took about 5 months of hard looking last year to find a place that we could afford that had enough space. I blurted out “We’ll take it!” once we examined the fuse box in the basement. It had some 20 AMP fuses in the basement! Oh yeah!

And the first time we used that flash dryer to cure shirts was sweet! Very, very sweet. It smelled like victory. Stinky, stinky victory. We’ve been using it for a few months here in our new place.

So, here’s the low down on that Ranar DA-1616 flash dryer for anyone who finds this on the internet, like I couldn’t.
- It’s a 110 volt unit and runs on regular household current, but it takes 20 AMP fuses and wiring and a special wall socket. We were unable to find an extension cord or adapter.
- It takes about 8 to 10 minutes to warm up fully.
- We were told by the manufacturer that it should be run on the highest setting at all times and to adjust the temperature by adjusting the distance of the unit from the shirt. That has worked fine for us, by the way. You can adjust the top up or down and it swings freely around. It has a handle on top that stays cool.
- We were advised that the unit works best if the surface under it is metal. We placed an old empty filing cabinet under it and lay the shirts, etc. on that. That has worked fine, too.
- I monitor the temperature closely with a laser sighted temperature gun until I feel the results I'm getting are consistent and then I only check occasionally through the run.
- It has worked well and even cured some plastisol shirts we had to do to replace some of the damaged ones.

Some of the fruits of our labors are here:
Deaths Head Designs Shirts

Next: Why Screen Print?

Inspiration in the form of a shirt

So I had this tee shirt. It was made by a company called Lip Service. I was very familiar with the company and had been enjoying their clothes for many years. They tended to be stylish, but not the most comfortable. But this one was different. It was my favorite t-shirt... ever. It was everything no other t-shirt in my experience was. It was soft and light weight and seemed to have no ink on it at all, but it had a cool picture. I used to wear it and wonder...

This is a close up of the print on the Lip Service shirt:

Then I bought this hoodie. Hmm. More mystery! A closeup of the print on the back of the hoodie:

You can see from these photos that the print is very different than the plastic ink that coats a t-shirt and sits on top of the fabric. I've never liked the feel of that plastic ink (plastisol). What the heck was this miracle of style and comfort? Of course, it was all just aimless curiosity until Freddy and I began discussing a silk screen business. At that point I had to KNOW. Because that’s what I wanted to do. Make people’s favorite shirts.

Well, you know, everything can be found on the internet (you found this blog didn’t you?) but it isn’t always easy. It was a long, circuitous route to the information I sought. And even then, I didn’t know for sure until I tried screen printing with the inks I had found. I found these two first:

Holden’s Discharge Inks from Standard Screen in NYC
Dharma’s Discharge Paste Color Remover

We tried the Holdens Discharge Ink from Standard Screen (in Red) first, on some black shirts for a band we are friends with. We had the screen made for us at Standard from a computer file I sent them. Working in Freddy’s basement. we screened up a batch of shirts and discharged them with a heat gun.

The way discharge ink works is this: You pour out as much ink as you think you will need into a mixing container, we use a plastic cup. You weigh it with a digital scale and mix in 10% (by weight) of the activator powder. Once you mix the discharge ink, it's only good for a few hours. They say up to 8 hours, but we notice a drop off in quality after 4. You silk screen the ink onto the shirts and before it dries, you heat it to about 300-350 degrees with a heat source that blows hot air (we used a heat gun to begin with though now we have a forced air flash dryer). You can see the print change color as the ink discharges the dye in the shirt. It gets brighter. Once you have discharged the print, the shirt is done and the ink is dry, though it has an unpleasant smell until you wash it or air it out.

The ink is water based so you can thin it with water if it gets too thick, you can use propylene glycol to slow down the drying time and you have to be careful not to let the ink dry in the screen, which means working quickly and being sure to back flood your screen with a good coating of ink. (More about back flooding in my next post.)

Here's Freddy preparing to print the red discharge ink we got. I had carefully mixed it with the activator:

JayJay discharging the shirts with a heat gun:

And we wore them to the show that night! And delivered our first screen printing job! Even if the shirts were a little smelly from the ink.

Off to a great start!

And here's a closeup I just took of one of those shirts after 3 years of wearing and washing:


Next: Dharma’s Discharge Paste Color Remover or Our Chemical Romance