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RE: Long Time, No See Steemians!! Haven't posted any ART in 1.5yrs!
I had a graphics class in high school where we made shirts, it was really fun, we used photo-shop to make our designs and then made the screens. We didn't have a fancy conveyor belt, we had a heater to dry the ink and if you left it for one second too long it burned the shirt(black shirts were popular when I was a kid) and one second to soon and it was still sticky. I failed that class and I have no idea why, I designed and made lots of shirts, I can't remember why I failed. . .
Cool. I also have the dryer you are probably referring to. It looks like a rectangle with a heating element and swings away on a stand. It's called a Flash Cure or a Spot Dryer. It's main purpose is to quickly dry each colour in-between printing for about 5secs so that it's dry to the touch so u can hit it with another coat of ink or colour. It can also be used as a dryer to cure the ink but you need to be very watch you don't start a fire.
I think my HS made theirs, it looked like heating lights used for chickens, it was just in a box. In fact all the frames and thing that held them were made in the HS wood shop and metal shot. Students made the frame holder, it was poorly welded, but it worked. They were made 20 or more years before I even had the class. The frames the wood shop teacher replaced regularly though, they weren't that old. I thought maybe silk screen shirts were new when they decided they wanted to make them, it would have obviously pre-dated computers. I know shirts from the 70s aren't slick screened, they had a iron on graphic or something, at least all the vintage Star Wars shirts are like that.
I've done that before with heating lights. I use to build and make all my screens and equipment when I first started out, been screen printing since 1991. Use to do all my colour separations by hand. Shirts from the 70s not all of them through were iron-on heat transfers. The glossy slick ones are called cold-peel transfers cause you wait till the transfer is cold and then peel it off and that gives it that slick glossy look.