One of the most important things you can do while maintaining your exposure units is to keep the glass on the exposure unit clean and free of debris. SprayWay Glass Cleaner is an easy and fast way to get your glass clear and ready to expose your screens.
Why You Should Clean the Glass on Your Exposure Unit
It is extremely important to keep the glass on your exposure unit clean of any debris, smudges, or marks. Having any sort of dirty spot on the glass will block the UV rays from reaching the emulsion. This creates a pinhole in the emulsion, meaning that there will be a spot where the emulsion did not harden. The soft spot in the emulsion ends up washing off leaving a pinhole on the screen. This will allow the ink to go through the hole during the screen printing process and create a spot of ink on your shirt that you did not originally plan for. Bummer right?! These types of pinholes get extremely tricky during high detailed prints, especially in halftones. The pinholes end up messing with your image overlapping. Using SprayWay Glass Cleaner will remove any of the spots on your glass that will cause these problems. Make sure to fully clean the glass of your exposure unit at least once a week. Don’t forget to inspect the glass before each exposure job, it is well worth it.
Benefits of SprayWay Glass Cleaner
Sprayway Glass Cleaner dissolves & loosens dirt, grease, grime, and grit. Its heavy duty foam clings to the vertical surfaces of your exposure unit, and it is guaranteed to leave no film. Optimized for best performance, Sprayway glass cleaner uses perfume-grade alcohol. Its special formula works great for cleaning both the glass of your exposure, as well as any other glass nearby.
Types of Glass on Exposure Units
Ryonet offers exposure units that have either low iron glass or clear glass. The feature rich, pro-level higher end units, like the Y3942CTS LED Exposure Unit, include the low iron glass which produces the highest level of clarity. The more entry level units below these, like the X1620 LED Exposure Unit, include clear glass. This has a little more iron it so it does block the UV rays a little bit more than the low iron glass. You will want to be more particular about cleaning the clear class than cleaning the low iron glass.
Go Glassless
If you don’t want to worry about glass while exposing your screens, you can always go glassless with a computer to screen wax ink printer. The Douthitt CTS output is maximized with the Xitron/Harlequin RIP. The Xitron/Harlequin RIP system enables custom workflows that can be created specifically for a shop to cover CMYK, Simulated Process, Spot Colors, and more. It offers full LPI control, the ability to choose your desired dot shape, as well as the angle of the dot to mitigate moire patterns.
If you are interested in learning more about exposure units and the screen printing process, check out Exposure Exhaustion: What Went Wrong and Screen Making 101: How to Make a Screen for Screen Printing.
