Waterbased Screen Printing 101

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Please find some links and notes from the 2 Regular Guys Podcast. Our guest today is a longtime friend of the show, Dave Gehrich. Dave, a 25+ year veteran of the industry, is VP of Sales with Atlas Screen Supply in Chicago. Dave is an avid supporter and experimenter with water base inks for textile printing. Dave will be sharing his expertise in waterbased screen printing with our audience today.

Sponsored by: Equipment Zone and Siser N.A.

Our regular listeners know this, but 2 Regular Guys are all about garment decorating, a bit of fun, and no rants or lectures or selling. We are not doing this for our employers, but rather for our industry. For the past 4 years, 2 Regular Guys have been the first and the most listened to garment decorating industry podcast on this planet! We are humbled by all of you tuning in each week. We work hard to bring you information that will make your business better, and our industry better. Take a look at our incredible weekly guest list and you’ll understand where this industry goes for news, interviews and the heartbeat of garment decorating. Thanks for listening!!

Waterbased Screen Printing 101

  • What are the top reasons for a screen printer to consider waterbase inks?
    1) customer request soft print…eh
    2) environmentally more better…eh
    3) EASIER ON THE PRINTER PHYSICALLY!!!
  • Is it true that you can just use water to clean up?
    No, water actually over fuels the ink and will dry it out quicker
  • Let’s talk curing. Infrared or forced air conveyor dryer?
  • Talk to us about underbasing waterbase compared with plastisol.
  • Here’s one you hear out in the printing world. Is all water based ink discharge?
  • One of the catalysts for this show was a request from a listener on Twitter, @TeeRabbitCo. They asked about Water Based Printing on Cotton Poly Blends or Poly. Can you speak to that?
  • People who know you think of you as the “Mr Wizard of Printing” always experimenting. What other fabrics have you had success or failures with?
  • A question I hear fairly often is how do garments printed with water base ink wash and wear compared with plastisol printed garments.

Dave Gehrich: He began his career in screen printing at the innocent age of ten working in his uncle’s shop cleaning screens. Eventually he would become a professional POP printer for a Midwest drug store chain until he was invited to join Intercontinental Chemical Corporation as a Technical Representative. In 2013 Dave accepted a new invitation and became the Vice President of Atlas Screen Supply charged with assisting in developing their technical support and educational offerings to the textile decorating industry they service. Dave maintains an active “print lab” at his home where he loves to work on “new stuff” which has earned him the nickname of “The MacGyver of printing” by his coworkers.

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This show is brought to you for a full hour by:

Equipment Zone, with 20 years experience selling garment printing equipment nationwide. Equipment Zone offers the new Epson F2000 SureColor direct-to-garment printer, their own VelociJet-XL DTG printer, and the all new SpeedTreater-TX automatic pretreat machine with a full 16”x24” pretreat area. Equipment Zone also carries a full line of DTG inks and supplies. Go to EquipmentZone.com

Siser North America’s new and improved website! Just recently Siser NA’s website was updated with a ton of new colors, helpful tools, and fun things to read. Head over to www.siserna.com and check out for yourself. A new great add-on to the site is the “Cutter Settings”. You will be able to get an idea of how you should have your vinyl cutter set up for each Siser material type. Then find out how each Siser product is applied, with the instructions available right there for you. Have you heard about the EasyPatterns™? There is a whole separate tab that will show all the different printed patterns Siser offers. Then while you’re at it, check out the Siser Blog. Get a great scope of all the “out of the box” ideas you can achieve with Siser HTV!


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