hello and welcome to another educational video about screen printing by catspit productions thanks a lot for clicking on my video today i really appreciate your time and attention please remember that if you like what i do you like my tutorials you like the information that i provide free on youtube for you all to enjoy then please support me by subscribing to my youtube channel i really need your support to keep growing the youtube channel and continue producing free educational videos right here on youtube so make sure you subscribe to my youtube channel right now alright so today i quickly wanted to just discuss and talk about my feelings on building up emulsion to increase your opacity and basically what we're talking about is building up the emulsion over mesh basically building a layer of emulsion as thick as you can on the substrate side of the screen in order to allow for a deeper inkwell what we call actually there are two ink wells on the screen the the side of the screen that we put the ink and the squeegee on the top side we refer to that as the inkwell side the flat side the side that comes in contact with the t-shirt or whatever you're printing is called the substrate side but there's also a place on the screen on the substrate side that we consider an inkwell and that's the area of open mesh to emulsion so basically the area where your stencil is and there's a depth of emulsion that's built up on the mesh that's why we coat with the substrate side first and then we do the inkwell side right to push all the emulsion to the substrate side so it builds up a layer of emulsion that is basically higher or creates a little bit of depth off of the emulsi of the mesh so we call that emulsion over mash okay so that is considered an inkwell and as we build up the emulsion and deepen that inkwell in the stencil it allows for more ink to be printed however this method is not necessarily um practical or really effective when you're talking about building up small layers of emulsion all right so this is a screen that i used for teaching a class where we just coded a million times and practiced coding and stuff so it wasn't ever used it was just put over for reclaiming and it got a little water on it so there's some water splatters but we can use this screen to demonstrate what we're talking about and basically what some people are learning on the internet or finding out is that if they coat the screen normally okay we're gonna do a one-one coat we're gonna we're gonna first do sorry we're gonna first do the substrate side right okay then we flip it around and we do the inkwell side right now that naturally pushes the majority of the emulsion to the substrate side to the bottom something okay so as we do that we we are actually building emulsion off of the bottom of this screen so some people are are finding that you know there's this technique of okay we let the screen dry and then we're going to come back and we're going to do subsequent coats of emulsion on the substrate side so we would allow the screen to dry we'd come back in the dark room conditions and we would lay another coat of emulsion on there and then we would allow that to dry and you could literally let that dry and do it again okay and the idea is that we're building up emulsion on the substrate side okay so imagine if you will that we we actually build up a layer of emulsion okay so now the emulsion has this depth on the substrate side that depth when you burn your stencil and you have a stencil in here the depth of the emulsion to mash emulsion over mesh is considered an inkwell all right so you know that when we are looking at the substrate side of the screen this is the substrate side as you can see because the stencil is backwards okay um when we're looking at this and we touch we you know touch this you can you can feel a certain depth between the emulsion and the mesh okay so this is what i'm talking about here this little bit of depth that exists on the substrate side of the screen between the emulsion and your open mesh the stencil right that is considered an inkwell so all these little areas of open stencil area with the emulsion this is this part is also considered an inkwell okay now as we coat more emulsion on this side we're going to build this layering up and it it creates a higher emulsion over mesh ratio evidently people are learning about this building up of the emulsion on the substrate side as a solution to gaining better opacity or better coverage and yes it does help and having that a higher emulsion over mesh ratio is very good however when it's on such a minor or small scale of maybe one or two extra coats it's not really going to do much for you in my professional opinion okay and here's why your setup on the press your screen the mesh tension the squeegee durometer the pallet the off contact the ink and your flood and stroke are all going to basically overpower that little bit of emulsion that you've built up okay so this is what i'm trying to say in my opinion it's not worth doing extra subsequent passes on the substrate side of the screen with emulsion to build up the stencil it's not necessary pay closer attention to your setup on press off contact is critical to getting great opacity with minimum effort okay your mesh tension is critical to getting maximum opacity with the least amount of effort and quite frankly the least volume of ink okay the looser your mesh is the harder it is going to be to be able to print and you're going to use a lot more ink than you need to okay so in my professional opinion here are the things that you want to pay attention to when you're trying to maybe print white ink on a black shirt and you want that high opacity you want to check these things first the first thing that you need to do is use an excellent screen make sure that the mesh tension is between 18 or 20 newtons and that the frame is rigid square and firm very solid screen you do not want the frame to wiggle you do not want the mesh to wiggle at all make sure to use proper off contact settings on your press off contact is critical to gaining higher opacity with the least effort make sure that the pallet is parallel to the screen when you're setting off contact also remember to set the off contact with the shirt on the pallet so that the off contact is proper and also remember that with off contact less is more you'd rather have lower off contact than very high off contact make sure to use the proper squeegee for what you're printing if you're printing white ink on black t-shirts you're going to want to use a softer squeegee durometer like 60 durometer 70 durometer is not the default squeegee durometer for everything on the planet so you need to consider these things when you're you know setting up the print job consider what ink you're printing on what fabric and then choose the squeegee appropriately if you flood and stroke incorrectly or with too much pressure it doesn't matter what you do with building up emulsion emulsion over mash or stencil thickness or whatever it doesn't matter you're set up you're off contact if you use too much pressure on the flood and stroke or you just you know flood and stroke in an improper way that's going to severely affect the print results in an adverse manner so remember that you know it takes time and experience to get your flood and stroke down so that you get the maximum opacity with the least amount of effort and that takes time and experience to get used to so remember that the flood and stroke is probably the most critical part of the process and you can basically out do or undo everything you've done in order to get the good print result by using poor flood and stroke techniques or way too much pressure also remember to use the proper mesh count with high opacity situations where you're trying to get the highest opacity possible with the least amount of effort you're going to want to use the most open mesh count you possibly can for the design and the ink thickness okay and i think that you know what i'm trying to say here is is that in order to gain proper opacity and increase your ink coverage and the ink opacity and to get the brighter whites and the better colors with those high opacity inks without using the white underbase and all that jazz you know to increase your opacity you're better off paying attention to these these things that i mentioned to you today okay rather than just trying to cure all with with a little bit of emulsion build up you follow that really is not going to be as effective as utilizing all these other tactics of proper setup and off contact and mesh count and proper mesh tension and squeegee durometer and all those things and of course make sure you use a really good high quality plastisol ink if you're using plastic solar water base whatever make sure you use a high quality ink and you can get those kinds of products from an excellent screen print supplier like cat's fit productions okay so like my plastisol inks are really awesome i'm really thrilled with the line of economy line inks that we have they're wickedly priced very competitively priced and they perform very well they're kick ass so try some of those inks out the high opacity economy white is excellent and we're gonna do a video about that here real soon okay so i hope i made this clear i you know i i just wanted to address this and talk about this a little bit so that you know you guys don't waste your time trying to coat and build up all this emulsion when you can put the time into the setup on press and that's really where you're going to get your opacity if you have any questions about this topic or anything about screen printing feel free to leave them in the questions below or you can message me on youtube or even through one of my websites at catspitproductionsllc.com and catspitscreenprintsupply.com you can message me through the contact us pages on both of those websites and i'm happy to help out with anything screen printing thanks a lot for watching today if you like what you see rate thumbs up comment below and please subscribe we'll see you next time you