BLACKSKYCRAFT: Punishment :: Modified Foxx Tone Machine

Alright so the weather was decent enough this weekend for me to proceed with the screen printing portion. So I tried to document as much of the process as I possibly could starting from the beginning. So i scrapped my existing screen by removing the emulsion and voila! here were (ignore the image that is stained on the screen, any paint that passes through will change the color of screens over time)

For this process you'll need Emulsion, (The larger white container), Photo Sensitizer (the small white container), and a squeegee (the red scraper). The quick explanation is that the light sensitive material will harden when exposed to light and anything not exposed to light will remain water soluble and we can wash it out. But first things first: Preparing the Emulsion:

Before we can use the emulsion, we need to mix in the photo sensitizer. There are differences across brands, but for the most part I've been using Speedball. The emulsion starts off as blue, and you'll need to open the small photo sensitizer bottle and fill it half way up with water and mix it up thoroughly. Then put it into the blue emulsion; this will cause it to turn green. At this point in the process it is OK for there to be light in the room, the bottle is covering the emulsion for the most part, and of course you'll need to be able to see what you're doing.

Stir it all up with a stirring stick of sorts, I have plenty of chopsticks from take out restaurants so I use those.

Now that we have the emulsion ready, we'll need to apply it to the screen. Put a small amount on the screen. What you see in the picture above is actually more than enough. You want to have a thin layer that covers the screen with no excess. This takes a little bit of time to get used to, any extra emulsion can be returned to the container.

After you have gooped it onto the screen, take your squeegee and smear it across the screen. you'll want to press into the screen and slide up and down. The process generally starts as just trying to get it to cover all corners of the screen. After you have done this, work on getting the excess off, Just scrape upward and then either wipe the goop off on a paper towel or try to get it back in the container. DO that over and over, and switch to both sides. THE GOAL IS TO GET A THIN FILM TO COVER THE SCREEN AND NOT HAVE EXCESS ON EITHER SIDE. With that in mind you should be able to get it down. After you have smeared a thin layer across the screen, put it aside in a dark place for about an hour and a half. I use the top shelf in my closet since it is flat and dark.

Onward to the next portion!!! Here is the printed screen on a transparency laid over the enclosure so we can once again see that it lines up and when we place the image on the emulsion it will be the right size. BE CAREFUL ABOUT PRINTING ON TRANSPARENCY!!! IT CAN RUIN YOUR PRINTER!!! you'll either need a special printer or special transparency. I personally go to Kinkos or UPS to get them to print out transparencies, that way the can keep printing until the scaling is correct. As you can see it looks like it did work out.

You'll need some sort of set up with your lamp to be ~12-18 inches above the screen. I use my bathroom since I can turn the light off and the lamp will be the only light source. I'll detail more later on the type of bulb I used, but i bought the hi wattage bulb and the clamp at Home Depot for about 10 dollars. (you don't have to shell out the money for the Speedball kit in case you're wondering)

So as you can see its basically a trash can on top of the toilet with a black peice of wood on top. I use the backside of my old drum practice pad. It is black and non-reflective so that there is no interference of reflection on the underside of the screen messing with the image.

After the screen has cured you'll want to make preparations in the dark and put the image on the screen backwards and line it up underneath the lamp and then turn on the lamp and let the image sit for about 10-12 minutes. The reason that you do it backwards is so that when you holding the screen up you have the "tray-side" of the screen looking up at you. really it doesn't matter so much, but its just a bit of a guide from what I've learned.

After the 10-12 minutes are up you can turn off the lamp and take the screen to the sink. You'll want to use an old toothbrush to really scrape out the goop under luke warm water. Here is where you'll really see how the light sensitive emulsion works. All the spots that were not exposed with light will be washed away.

As you're scraping away, hold it up to the light to see how well you are scraping the emulsion out. If you don't remove all the emulsion from the area that you want then it will result in the printed image.

After you've cleaned the screen to your satisfaction, you can put it back under the lamp for a couple of minutes to harden even further.

Use a hair dryer to dry the screen (alternatively you can let it sit for a while).

While you're waiting go ahead and spray paint the enclosure(s). I'm still learning how to spray paint, but if I have learned anything, its that you should go light on the spray paint and go over it multiple times. In the above image I've only gone over the enclosure with one pass. Even still I had some runs on the vertical faces. Once you have them sufficiently covered, let them sit for two hours or so and keep them away from dust/pollen/dander/cats, etc.

Now onto the part we've all been waiting for, the printing portion!!! Here is what I've set up to use. The painted enclosure is on some scrap paper and flanked by two 1590BB enclosures without the bottom plates. The aim here was to have the black enclosure sitting a little higher than the 1590BBs so that the screen can be securely held down against the enclosure without stretching the screen too much.

As you can see, just setting the screen on top of the black enclosure, there is a little bit of height clearance.

The next part is where you'll need an extra set of hands to hold the screen down tight against the enclosure. At some point I'll make a rig to hold it down, but in the meantime I get help. So I line up the image with the screen and then prep the acrylic paint.

Stir up the paint....

and dab a decent amount onto the top of the image. where you are going to print. The next portion doesn't have any pictures since there were no extra hands to take pictures. but basically its similar to the screen preparation portion, where you scrap down, up and across trying to get an even amount of paint to go across the image.

Here is an example of what happens when you leave a smear on the screen and then remove the screen from the enclosure. This is OK because this is for me, but if you're doing this for other people you'll want to avoid the above situation. As you can see on the screen above, there is a weird wave going across screen image, and on the enclosure you can see the weird wave, it is caused by there being an abundance of paint on the screen as you separate the screen from the image....