hey screen printers this is Ryan from Ryan in this screen printing instructional video we're going to talk about screen printing on metal now it's a screen printer you're often going to have requests from customers to do things other than t-shirts the cool things about screen printing is that you can actually print almost anything as long as you can fit a screen onto it so think outside of the box and don't be afraid to try anything this is a metal binder that we're going to be talking about in a second we're going to print this with a solvent based ink now a lot of times you're putting other things than t-shirts you have to use different types of inks so you need to make sure to do some research on a type of ink for your substrate this is coated with a clear coat essentially like a painted clear coat and we're going to be using our general-purpose ink which prints well onto painted surfaces now we have four lines of this ink tech solvent ink we also have different inks and other inks available depending if you're printing poster paper or would you use water-based inks depending on the type of substrate that you're printing on you might want to use a different type of solvent ink a lot of information on our knowledge base that talks about different things for different substrates so don't just throw any type of ink on any substrate because it might not adhere well this is an air dry ink so we don't need a curing process - this is just air dries we're going to be setting this on a standard t-shirt platen we got the platen a little bit sticky so I've already created a set up to that we're also gonna be using our reilly hopkins jr so i have a hash mark here now the cool thing about this is solid substrates you can actually register fairly easily so two colors printing for solid substrate is done a little bit differently this is just a one color black on this metal logo that we're going to be doing but if we were doing two colors we print the first color we let it dry and then we print the second color because this is a solid object unlike a t-shirt that moves all the way around we can actually come and draw lines in or actually create little bumper stops to put the binder or whatever we're printing in the same spot on the platen every single time so I've gotten this lined up we're gonna be using general-purpose ink today black now typically you want to thin this ink down we already have about 2% of thinner in this ink so we're good to go on the thinning now you do want to keep in mind this is an air dry ink so that as we print it it's going to dry very fast way fast from the water base in fact so you want to always want to leave the screen flooded we always want to print aggressively and once we're done printing literally if we walk away from the screen for a couple minutes it will start to dry so you want to do your whole production run at one time let's get this thing set up and start printing a couple things that are very important one you want to make sure you're using the right emulsion we're using a graphic emulsion that resists this graphic ink two is off contact is key here so we have a tight screen with a good amount of off contact if we were on contact that ink would not have a replace to release onto the substrate the substrates other than t-shirts they do not receive ink the same way a t-shirts flexible it receives some ink into it this does not so off contact us heat if you can get away with doing smaller squeegees you can control the ink a lot better so for instance this print gonna be way easier if I go like this and then using a basically gene going like this so we're gonna load the ink up and the screen we're not going to use a lot of ink cuz we're only printing one now this ink is thin but it is also thick so it's kind of like got some interesting medium carrot characteristics to ink so we don't want to load too much in the screen because then we have to clean more out it's difficult and since we're only doing one print now if we're going into production print we'd probably want to load more the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to load screen up so very similar to water-based printing and I am going to pull this I feel when I pull the squeegee especially when graphic a printer you can control the angle and the release of the ink a lot more than pushing so I'm gonna pull this I'm gonna go pretty slow good amount of pressure and then let that ink print on to the substrate so let's check it out now if we're gonna do another print we'd always want to back flood so we back flood that back instead of the squeegee in the back of the screen that looks slick so the cool thing about graphic printing like this is I think it just comes out awesome we have a halftone filter over this so you can actually see little tiny halftone dots all throughout this print a solid substrate unlike a t-shirt can actually hold a lot more detail so you can get really intricate with your designs once we're done printing we're going to take all the wet ink and put it back into the container if it's dry like this don't try to scrape it off only deal with the wet ink that's why you don't want to load screen with too much ink the other thing that you want to keep in mind is this ink is stinky so you want to make sure to do this in a ventilated area and make sure you have plenty of airflow around the ink otherwise the fumes can get to you once we're done cleaning all the ink off we want to use to solve it specifically designed for graphic ink to wipe the screen down before we go reclaim it you can find those solvents available on our website and ask for recommendations if you have any questions once we printed this we're gonna let this ink dry for about ten to fifteen minutes before you go into production you always want to do some scratch testing to ensure the ink is biting into your substrate now what we actually printed here is around at--we binder and round it why binder so it's kind of a way and why we put stories of customer success cool stories from screen printing and stories from our team members that inspire us to remember us help us remember why we're working here around it and what we do every day if you have a cool story send it to us and it might work its way into this binder that sits in our lobby here in Washington now let's say you want to print binders but you don't want the mess of this different type of ink or investing or learning a new type of printing well you can actually become an ASI member which is a partner of rinette and have access to over a billion different products minders golf balls I mean even spatulas if you want a company's name and logo on them this can really expand your business it's very affordable to get into so check out ASI options available on our website to see what a partnership with ASI is all about so thanks a lot for watching guys we appreciate that you want to expand your screen printing knowledge be sure to subscribe to our YouTube page for more awesome screen printing tutorials and have an awesome day