I bought this cooking thermometer today.
It says that it’s good for -50 to 150C. But does that just mean that it can measure up to 150C, or it mean that the entire thermometer can withstand 150C? Inside an oven? For hours?
It feels awfully plastickey.
I finally got the correct squeegee for screenprinting onto fabric:
It has rounded edges instead of the square ones used when printing onto paper. So I made yet another attempt with the screen I made weeks ago.
Success!!!
It takes a few attempts to get comfortable with the squeegee, but I did a few trial runs “dry” to try to control the pressure better, and I think I’m getting the hang of it.
The squeegee itself is kinda badly made, though. As you can see, this Speedball squeegee is just a rubber ting stuck badly into a piece of wood.
The ink gets trapped inside the wedge there, which makes it impossible to wash completely. The wood is very porous, too, which makes the ink stick to it like crazy.
I think I’ll try to find a better one. The first one I bought (for paper printing) is perfect in that regard, and feels very solid.
Now I just have to make a new screen with a larger image, which is why I needed an A3 printer in the first place.
I bought an HP Officejet 7110 (which is an A3 inkjet printer) to print stuff for screenprinting and the like. It prints out nicely onto normal paper, but whenever I tried printing onto any type of plastic (transparencies for screenprinting or vinyl for t-shirt transfers) it creates these annoying lighter horizontal lines:
After trying all the different print modes, and calibrating with each of them, I found some settings that lessened the problem, but nothing that could remove the problems totally.
Now, the 7110 is the cheapest A3 printer I could find, so it’s perhaps not surprising that it’s not… fabulous. So I got a more expensive printer, the Epson Stylus Photo R3000. Which is also an A3 inkjet printer.
Look, ma, no lines!
Well, except where there’s supposed to be lines.
But it’s not a perfect printer. The main issue I’ve had with it so far is that you can’t use the front loader unless you’re using really stiff paper, and plastics aren’t very stiff. So you have to use the back/top loader, which means that it takes up a lot more space than it should have to.
It prints out very nicely, though. On paper, vinyl and transparencies (it’s down with OHP, even if the manual doesn’t say anything about it) — it looks good on all media I’ve tried it with. Work well with CUPS under Linux, too, although it’s new enough that I had to install the .deb driver for it manually.
And it has a gazillion paper quality options, and lots if various inks. Four black inks, for instance: Matte black, shiny black, light black and light light black. (Yes, it’s called that.)
So that’s not much of a review, except to say: The Hewlett-Packard Officejet 7110 sucks if you want to use it for screenprinting, and the Epson R3000 works great.
I’m still still still waiting for the right squeegee (the squeegee shop owners apparently went to France for the summer) for doing screen printing, but I got a shipment of t-shirt blanks. So I had to make something.
I bought a different make of iron-on transfers — this time for black shirts. Sigel Foil T-Shirt Transfers. Or something:
These are pretty nice. You print out onto the transfer “paper”, remove the backing, and then iron the plastic onto the shirt. The end result is kinda stiff, so it makes the shirt bunch up a bit, but it does look quite nice.
For an iron-on transfer thing. How’s that for a review.
Look at how nice the latest album from Peter Christopherson (from Coil) is. (Although he died a few years ago.)
It’s called Time Machines II, and it comes on a wooden USB stick inside a pewter box wrapped in a leather bag.
And the music is high-class, too. AIFF with lots of bits and stuff.