TBT: Where Was Your Shirt Made? Eight Years Later In April 2018, Rick Roth published Where was your shirt made? How was your shirt made? It ran five years after the Rana Plaza collapse in Savar, Bangladesh, which killed at least 1,129 garment workers and injured more than 2,000. The piece named four companies…
°FAI: Which Number Is Lying? A Morning of Making the Data Honest Our weekly press report showed setup running at 18.2 minutes per screen, over our target. That target isn’t arbitrary. It came out of the work I walked through in °FAI: Screen printing setup times, where it drops by a minute a week as…
The first problem is not powder Homer, running two converted Epsons, put it plainly in January 2022: “Powder isn’t the problem, it’s the damn white print heads clogging up.” Three months later he had a machine on a pallet ready to leave. “I spent 3 days trying to unclog the print head. Nothing worked.” TBT: DTF…
The Shirt Board has been quietly running for over twenty years. Somewhere in those threads is almost every screen printing question that’s ever been asked, and answered, argued about, answered again better. The problem is finding any of it. Search engines barely touch old forums anymore. So we built a system that lets an AI…
Drawn from working printers’ conversations on The Shirt Board, 2013–2015. Direct quotes link to the exact post. Other references link to the thread. TBT: Thin Thread Mesh: The Best Upgrade Screen mesh has two numbers. Most printers only know the first one. A “150” screen has 150 threads per inch. But the second number, the…
Bouncing between projects, jumping on a call, answering a “quick question” that ate forty minutes, at the end of the week I couldn’t tell you where any of it went. So I built a time tracker. Not an app I downloaded. Not a subscription. One HTML file that runs in any web browser, on my…
Screen Exposure: Bake the Cake Drawn from working printers’ conversations on The Shirt Board, 2011–2017. Direct quotes link to the exact post. Other references link to the thread. TBT: Screen Printing Exposure: Bake the Cake Exposure is the step where a coated screen becomes a stencil — or fails to. It’s also the most misunderstood…
Two weeks ago the press log credited someone with a sixteen-hour breakdown. So I made some updates to the logs. You can check out the earlier development here, here and here. The tablet went to sleep overnight, its software timers stopped with it, and the check-in popup and auto-pause slept right through, while the clock…
Drawn from working printers’ conversations on The Shirt Board, 2013–2016. Source threads linked throughout. Every printer has a coating ritual, one wet pass or two, sharp edge or round, which side last. Far fewer can tell you what those rituals actually produce, because the result of coating isn’t a routine, it’s a measurement: EOM, emulsion…
A few weeks ago I did a Shirt Show episode, and one of the things we talked about was keeping a human in the loop. Because ultimately, a junior separator learns by failing. You fail over and over again, and then you get better at what you’re doing. °FAI: Human in the loop AI, Keep…
