“Screen Printing on Wood Boxes and Crates – The Authorative Guide”
Here at North Rustic Design we are always creating new stock and working on processes to improve our product line and supply our customers with the best possible goods. With that in mind and based on several customer requests, we created our own in house design and screen printing department.
When I came on board with the company I brought with me over 25 years of design and screen printing experience and it wasn’t long before we saw the potential in embellishing our products with company logos and launching a line of wildlife ammo boxes. We were starting from scratch and the first thing we needed to do was set up a new computer station and aquire the necessary equipment to print on wood. My experiences in the past were always the textile industry. Printing on wood posed a new challenge for us and through careful thought and a little ingenuity we built a top of the line screen printing station and we were off and running. We designed and built our own exposure unit for ‘burning’ screens that would work for the materials we needed to print. By building a glass topped and fan cooled unit to expose the light sensitive screens and by placing the finished art on film in the unit, we were able to make stencils that held fine detail and held up to the rigors of printing on a rough wooden board or box. We discovered a type of enamel based, air dry ink that when cured was as tough as the products we printed on.
I often get asked how we actually do the screen printing on our products and thought it might be interesting to explain the process.
- Upon either receiving an art file from a customer or creating one for them in house and having approval for the design, the art is sized to fit the products we are printing and then transferred from the computer to a laser film that allows light to pass through the unprinted areas of the film.
- We then take a silk screen that has been coated with a light sensitive emulsion, place the film on the screen and expose it to 1000 watts of light in our exposure unit. The time varies depending on the detail in the design but it is rapidly exposed and ready to be washed out. With a light spray of water the areas that were blocked out of the light on the screen from the blackness of the design are rinsed out of the mesh and that area is what allows the ink to pass through the screen.
- After drying the screen it is placed into hinged clamps on our printing table and the image area is aligned with the product we are printing on. We then tape off all parts of the screen that are not in the image area and flood the screen with an enamel ink…the color of which is determined by the customer.
With the screen lowered down to within a small gap between the mesh and the wood in a process that is called ‘off-contact’, the ink is forced through the stencil with a hard rubber bladed squeegee and the finish design is transferred to the wood. The product is then allowed to dry for 24 hours so that it is ready to ship or be stained.
It is a time consuming process and it takes quite a bit of attention to detail, but the end result is a perfectly embellished crate or box with your company logo or our original art. There is a nominal, one time set up fee for the screen. If a customer reorders, that fee is waved the next time around and for as long as that same design is used. We do not charge for art work if the customer supplies their design in a vectored format (i.e. eps, pdf, ai or cdr). We do proudly offer professional art service if you need us to create a logo for you. All art is emailed to our customers for art approval before it is ever put on their product. I hope this was informative and the whole embellishing process makes a little more sense to those who don’t have prior screen printing knowledge. Please remember that we are here to assist you with your product development and will do everything possible to give your goods an exciting and unique appearance.
Kevin
North Rustic Design Art and Printing Dept.