I need to acquire some skills in the art of screen printing. Made plenty of posters 40 years ago this way. But what I need to do now is a bit more demanding in the accuracy department than the average t-shirt requires.
This is what most web sites offering screen-print supplies and stencil-making services are about, t-shirts.
I have decided that laser-printing meter scales on paper has too many drawbacks. Paper is a convenient get-by strategy for prototypes, but I'd like to print the scale directly to the blank white surface of the aluminum scale plate.
Laser print on plastic sheet looks better, but the software I use only yields one meter scale for each 8.5 by 11 print. The plastic sheets at the office-supply stores are too pricey to print one meter scale per sheet.
The kicker here is dimensional accuracy. The meter-scale CAD I use is called "Meter", sold by Tonne Software. It will send images directly to the Windows print device, or to a file in HPGL format. They come out the exact, desired size on the printer this way.
Just how I get a HPGL file translated to a screen stencil pattern, and to a finished screen is where I'm stuck.
The dimensions really have to match the original printer output. Not a lot of margin for error.
I'll continue surfing screen-print service web sites, but advice from someone with experience could save me some wasted time and money figuring out just how to obtain a ready-to-use screen for this task.
Ideally, getting multiple meter-face images on one screen would sound more economical, but getting them translated from HPGL, and laid out together on one image file has me baffled. Never claimed to be a graphics-art wiz.
73
This is what most web sites offering screen-print supplies and stencil-making services are about, t-shirts.
I have decided that laser-printing meter scales on paper has too many drawbacks. Paper is a convenient get-by strategy for prototypes, but I'd like to print the scale directly to the blank white surface of the aluminum scale plate.
Laser print on plastic sheet looks better, but the software I use only yields one meter scale for each 8.5 by 11 print. The plastic sheets at the office-supply stores are too pricey to print one meter scale per sheet.
The kicker here is dimensional accuracy. The meter-scale CAD I use is called "Meter", sold by Tonne Software. It will send images directly to the Windows print device, or to a file in HPGL format. They come out the exact, desired size on the printer this way.
Just how I get a HPGL file translated to a screen stencil pattern, and to a finished screen is where I'm stuck.
The dimensions really have to match the original printer output. Not a lot of margin for error.
I'll continue surfing screen-print service web sites, but advice from someone with experience could save me some wasted time and money figuring out just how to obtain a ready-to-use screen for this task.
Ideally, getting multiple meter-face images on one screen would sound more economical, but getting them translated from HPGL, and laid out together on one image file has me baffled. Never claimed to be a graphics-art wiz.
73
