Duplexing with screen printing

Hello everyone,

I once read that duplexing could be accomplished with the help of a screen printer. I’ve tried my hand at it to make some solid colors on one side of the papers I was printing the other day and I felt pretty confident and the results came out great.
I wanted to ask if anyone could recommend what kind of glue would one use to do it with a silk-screen.
The spray adhesive method gets really messy real soon, and this seems like it could also be a more affordable approach, since 3m Super 77 is really expensive. I would like to cut down on the already high costs of duplexing.
Building a roller press would be easy enough, so if I could screen print the glue on, it would make my duplexing much easier, I know a Potdevin is out of the question for me right now because the cost is prohibitive for my budget at the moment.
I imagine the glue would have to be solvent based to not damage the paper. But that’s just my guess.
I would really like to know your suggestions.

Thanks a lot!

Enrique

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enriquevw and all

You reminded me of a style of printing which I have not seen for decades.

Colour placards about 14 inches by 10 inches were printed on one side, full colour; after evaluation, more colour on the obverse was printed, to enhance the front colour. These were marketing placards for food-store display, often of meat. The areas of enhancement were carefully chosen, not whole of printed area.

When back-lit, very effective.

Has anyone tried this recently? I think they were most easily done by letterpress.

Alan.

enriquevw and all

You reminded me of a style of printing which I have not seen for decades.

Colour placards about 14 inches by 10 inches were printed on one side, full colour; after evaluation, more colour on the obverse was printed, to enhance the front colour. These were marketing placards for food-store display, often of meat. The areas of enhancement were carefully chosen, not whole of printed area.

When back-lit, very effective.

Has anyone tried this recently? I think they were most easily done by letterpress.

Alan.

enriquevw and others

I remembered the important point when I started the comment, forgot it along the way.

Placards were printed on clear plastic, about a millimetre or two thick, usually curved so they would stand up on counter, maybe needed something to keep the curve?

Alan.

Hello Alan,

I’m not sure what the placards have to do with the duplexing I’m talking about.

I’m referring to joining two or more pieces of paper to make a thicker stock or a two color stock.

The thing you talk about is still being done with offset and digital, specially for movie theater prints, and fast food joints. They print on both sides some of the colors to make the backlit print more intensely colored.

Usually they use screenprinting for that type of work, as well, though, so it’s not totally off topic; perhaps he mistook what you were asking for.

I’m not sure what kind of adhesive you should use, but this board is the wrong place to ask IMHO- you should contact a screenprinter or ask on gigposters in the screenprinting forum, or perhaps get in touch with an ink and coating manufacturer to find an alternative; at worst case, perhaps you can check out daige’s rollataq.

Oh I’m sure that’s been done with screen printing, but since I was talking about adhesives, I thought it was unrelated to actually printing an image.
I know that it’s been suggested in discussions here that someone might look for a screen printer to duplex sheets of paper.
I was just wondering if anyone knew what adhesive would work, since I’m already confident on the screen printing technique for something simple enough like this.

Have you thought then about making a stencil ,look at typical screen printing frame and the design .
Find yourself a fabric mesh with holes no bigger than 1/16” stretch it across a frame . make a frame that sits within the first and this one you apply an acetate sheet to the frame with your glue area cut out of it . screw the larger frame to hinges that allow you to attach the hinge to a base board you need the mesh side to be the bottom side . you set up guides on the base board and you close the mesh down over a layed up sheet and with a reasonably large stiff brush you stipple the glue onto the sheet through the acetate and mesh , you can repeat this extremely quickly when you learn how high to lift the stencil up to change the sheet for the next application , you can add a swinging leg to allow you to keep the sceen up which you just knock out of the way to lower it each time , if you get it right you can leave a blob of glue on the acetate all the time and leave the brush on top as you work this save a lot of time too. you dont need vacuum ,you can peel the job off the back of the screen if need be you still have control over mess and relative position of the glue areas .

Enrique, seriously look into Daige’s Rollataq.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3cnKM7oY1g

They make a little roller coater that might be worth your time; but if you do some investigation into the adhesive itself, you’ll see that it should work with an 85-110 mesh count screen.

COSTS:
http://www.dickblick.com/products/daige-rollataq-adhesive-system/

I have been screenprinting for a long time and if I were going to recommend something to test, I’d say this stuff is the right consistency, perhaps slightly thin at times but it has a similar consistency to some of the inks I use- a relatively long open timeā€¦ With minimal modification one should be able to make it work. You might need some Propelyne Glycol to retard it, but if you do w/b screenprinting you probably have that around.