Today, I strolled, a few minutes late, into the unnamed
screen-print shop where I toil, while Michael King was probably there an hour
early. (We aren’t saying WHICH print shop, because we don’t want all of you
crazy fans to come bug us while we’re trying to get our work done! Suffice it
to say, we’re in the Pacific Northwest, in the U.S. of A.)
My first task of the day was to coat the batch of screens that I cleaned on Friday with light-sensitive emulsion, which is about the same consistency as syrup, but green. In order to complete the coating task, I use a scoop coater. “What the hell’s a scoop coater?” A few months ago, I didn’t know either. It’s a metal tray thing, maybe 14 or 16 inches long, with one particularly crisp (not quite sharp) edge.
(Sorry the picture is dark, but the emulsion has to be kept in the dark-room or it will turn black and get all ruiny.) The scoop coater is filled most of the way with the emulsion, then drug across the surface of a clean screen, coating the sucker in goo. Once I’ve done a couple of coats on each side of the screen, I stick them in the drying rack and turn on the fan, which blows air up from underneath the stack. They’ll dry for a few hours, or maybe overnight.
Exciting, right!? After that, I dump the unused emulsion
back into the bucket from whence it came and rinse the coater so it’s ready for
its next adventure, and then I go check “the board” to see what print jobs
we have for the day. (There are a LOT of orders that come through our little
shop, so most days are a mad dash to finish everything before the deadline…) After all this stuff, it’s off to the BACK ROOM, where all the magic happens…but that might be a
story for another time!
---Richard F. Yates
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