Unit 6 Equipment and Machinery for Flat-bed Screen Printing

A screen printing table with squeegee guidance is designed purely for manual operation, and fitted with high-precision

guides on the screen frame holder to ensure accurate positioning of the screen in the printing situation. A vacuum suction plate is used to hold and fasten down the substrate during the printing process. On account of the squeegee guidance, the printing process can be executed with a specified squeegee angle and pressure force. Sheet feeding and delivery are done manually.

Semi-automatic machines enable production capacity to be increased in comparison to manually-operated screen printing equipment. The screen is raised and lowered automatically. On account of a combination of two squeegees, the screen

flooding and the actual printing process where ink is pressed through the screen take place automatically. In this case it is possible to program multiple squeegee operations, if a particularly large amount of ink is re-quired, which is the case with textiles.With semi-automatic machines the feeding of the sheet and delivery of the printed sheet are still done manually on a vacuum printing table.

Fully automatic machines are used in industrial screen printing. They are equipped with sheet feeder and delivery units. Such machines often have several printing units for multicolor printing and an appropriately designed drying line (hot air, IR drying, UV drying).