Ghettoclamps - A study in MacGyverisms and Screen Printing
Posted April 27th, 2009. By Kim André.
Screen printing is not an exact science, it is not a process where you take a file from your computer and output it directly to paper. Screen printing does not give you anything for free. Screen printing is a problem-solving exercise like no other.
So what do you do when you buy new screens that do not have the threaded holes for mounting to your press that your old screens do?
You pull out the duct-tape, the scrap wood, the box of left over screws…
…and go Macgyver.
Screens come in many varieties, and so do presses. Our Svecia has a system where the screen-clamps aren’t actually clamps. Instead, the press has two arms fitted with holes that you mount your screen to using threaded holes in the screens themselves.
The guys at the gigposters.com forum thought this had to be a non-original part, but since Svecia parts are notoriously hard to come by, not to mention in Norway, where screen printing is much, much more obscure than in the states, buying an original clamp-rig for un-drilled screens wasn’t really an option. Instead, I designed a bolt on clamp for the ones we already had. Sadly, I haven’t got access to the tools I’d need to make it here in Trondheim.
So what do we do? Well, first I visited Clas Ohlson where I found the meat of the clamp, one of those things you use to secure two pieces of 2×4 to each other in a joint. I found a size that fit and some matching screws.
It turned out that the screen would be to heavy and when applying pressure on it, the metal part bended, making it impossible to tighten the screen sufficiently. So Knut had the bright idea that we’d have to secure the 90 degree angle, something we did by cutting up a piece of scrap wood and securing it to the side of the clamp with wood screws. Then since the new screens have a smaller frame-profile than our old ones, we stuck another piece of wood into the clamp on the sides as a spacer.
Ghettoclamps, they worked like a charm…
