From Flood Bars to Stencil Wells: Understanding the Key Components of Successful Screen Printing

Flood Bars and Flood Strokes.

Many know that the flood bar on an automatic press along with the flood stroke move the ink into position for the squeegee, but many do not understand the more important task. Yes, the flood bar spreads ink along the length of the screen, but it also forces the ink into the mesh and stencil well.

The Stencil Well is the thickness of the emulsion layer on the print side of the screen that holds the ink until the squeegee sheers that connection and transfers the ink to the garment. Remember our conversation about proper screen drying? Now you are putting that to work. This is why only a small amount of squeegee pressure is actually needed. You want as much ink as possible to be left behind on top of the garment and not scooped back up by the squeegee. You need to know this if you want to be a good Screen Printer.

The same rules apply when manually printing. Your flood stroke positions the ink across the screen forcing the ink into the stencil well, your next squeegee pass is the one that sheers the ink from the screen depositing it onto the garment/substrate.

Screen printing involves a series of interconnected steps. Each should be understood in order to achieve great press prints.

(c) Freehand Library Article / AccuRIP / Separation Studio NXT / Spot Process / Dmax / Amaze-Ink / DarkStar