Exposure unit waste of money?

Question

I wanna start doing screenprinting again to make prints/posters I learned to do this in college off of a pretty heavy duty exposure unit with a vac. Is this technology really necessary, or can I do really professional quality prints with a homemade lightbox?

Answer 1

Great question.

I've done a lot of screen printing since I learned in college using around the house materials.

The big issue is not the vacuum exposure unit for me, but the toxic nature of the inks, and other chemicals.

So now I use tube watercolor as my ink and instead of trying to wash out the stencils from a screen, I simply wash out the water-based ink and then store and reuse the screen.

To save money on screens, I use sheer polyester curtain material from a discount store. I stretch it and staple it to old wood picture frames.

There is a wealth of great screen printing information on instructables.com -

http://www.instructables.com/tag/?sort=n...

Read some of these excellent pictorials for simple home equipment and techniques.

Screen On !!!