A few comments  of my own after Tom’s longer post on squeegees yesterday.

–       Squeegees are probably the most underrated item in almost every shop I have visited.  You can overcomes many problems in a shop, but it is almost impossible to do good printing with bad squeegees.

–       Don’t trust the company that makes your press, from what I have seen, none of them put good squeegees in the press when they ship it to you. A friend bought a $150,000 press and wondered why he was double stroking on all jobs. He assumed like another friend this week that the machines would naturally come with the ideal squeegees material. Not true.

–       Sharpening squeegees is way better than using dull ones. However, if you are going to sharpen squeegees, be very very careful in doing so. The heat of an abrading wheel can alter the squeegee material’s hardness. Slicing or even abrading can take down the length of the squeegee and a 1.5 inch tall squeegee will not have the same action as a 2 inch squeegee. In my shop we flip them once and then we replace them.

–       Don’t soak them to clean them, they absorb the liquid and it changes them. I mention this because it is the second most common mistake about squeegees that I see in shops.

–       Do the math and see that if even one big job prints poorly or takes a long time to set up and you probably could have bought a round of good squeegees. There are many places you can save money in your shop, paying less for squeegee rubber or using them after they are dull, nicked or swollen is not the place to save money.

–       You want to use triple durometer squeegees for almost all jobs with only a few exceptions. 60/90/60 and 70/90/70.