Konfeksiyon Teknik Dergisi Mayıs 2017 Sayısı

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KONFEKSİYON TEKNİK | MAYIS | MAY | 2017
Screen printer slashes prepress
and garment drying times
Chris Newcomer conceived the name BigPlanetApparel
on a trip to Costa Rica. “I love to travel,
and our planet is such a fun place to explore,” he
says. “So BigPlanetApparel really fit in with what
I wanted my life and my business to be about.”
He became interested in the business while taking
high school screen printing classes, and for years
he toyed with the idea of starting his own screen
printing shop. But it wasn’t until his Costa Rica trip
that the concept—and the name—took hold.
Newcomer began by piecing equipment together
from Craigslist and Ebay, and set up shop in a
friend’s basement. “Initially the equipment was
a hodgepodge from different manufacturers,”
he admits. In addition to an infrared conveyor
dryer, a six colour/four station press, and a flash
cure unit, he purchased a used Vastex ultraviolet
screen exposing unit. In the early days, local
churches and non-profit organisations comprised
most of BigPlanetApparel’s customers. Volume
grew as church members asked for T-shirts and
sweat shirts for their businesses. “Most of my business
is word of mouth,” says Newcomer, who also
caters to local colleges and community groups.
New prepress equipment improves emulsion quality,
cuts screen drying and exposing times over 90%
As business expanded, Newcomer’s original equipment
was not up to the task. “My conveyor dryer
wouldn’t maintain a consistent temperature, so I
knew that it was on its way out,” he says. Newcomer
also needed a better way to dry screens after
applying emulsion. “I was drying screens by fanning
them,” he says. “You get a fair amount of dirt
and residue on the screens, and it doesn’t make for
good printing.” He also wanted to reduce his exposure
times. With these goals in mind, he turned
to Vastex International, Allentown, Pennsylvania. “I
had attended Vastex’s A-to-Z screen printing class
to sharpen my skills and got to see a lot of their
equipment up close,” he says. For his first upgrade,
Newcomer leased a 10-screen Dri-Vault VDC-2536
screen drying cabinet, which lowered his preparation
time from overnight to one hour. “I used to
spend hours preparing screens and it was a huge
waste of time,” he says. “The Dri-Vault cabinet has
adjustable heat, so I don’t have to blast everything
at the highest heat setting. And it has an internal
fan so the heat is even and dries both sides of
the screen rather than only one side.” To coat his
screens with emulsion, Newcomer now uses a C-100
screen coater rack. Previously, he would lean his
screens against the wall and hold them in place
with his foot. “I would have to bend over pretty far,
and it was causing wear and tear on my body.”
With the C-100 rack, Newcomer can fit screens
of all popular sizes into the clamp and adjust the
screen to a comfortable height, improving the ease
and uniformity of the coating process. Newcomer
was still exposing screens with his original Expos-It
E2227 unit but knew he needed to reduce his exposure
times. “The Expos-It uses ultraviolet light, and
if the bulbs were new it was a 12-minute exposure
time,” he says. “Toward the end of the bulb’s life, it
would take 15 to 20 minutes. And the bulbs had to
be replaced almost every year, at $20 per bulb.”
Instead of buying a new exposure unit, Newcomer
retrofitted his existing one with an LED light pack, reducing
exposure times to roughly one minute, while
improving the resolution of halftones and line work.