HOW TO BUILD A COST EFFECTIVE EXPOSURE UNIT

1. Intro: hello and welcome to how to build a cost effective exposure unit out of using PVC pipes and a holiday and work light with very little tools needed. My name is Cody, and I will be taking me through all the necessary steps. We will cover all the tools and materials needed for the completion off this class project , and we will go over the correct exposure time for this particular unit. I've been in the computer graphic print industry for a good number of years, and I know starting up is the hardest thing to do in the expenses that comes along with it . So this class is for anyone looking to start learning how to screen print with very little costs. So let's get started. I'll see you soon. 2. Tools & Materials: hello and welcome to build cost effective exposure unit out of using PVC pipe as the base. This doesn't really look like much right now, but once we start reassembly the pieces together, it will start to look like an exposure unit that we could potentially use for creating for burning our screens. So let me get started with what we're gonna need roughly. And then I'm gonna also have this in detail list of tools and materials and the dimensions that are gonna be needed for the construction part of the of the explosion. It. So let me get started. The the first, then you're gonna need what I did was I went to home people on and again. This is your preference. Where were you? Shop at regularly. You can go to Old Depot. You can have them cut this down for you. I chose not to. I just purchased. The size you're gonna need is is 3/4 inch PVC pipe by 10 feet, and this is enough with a bit of extra left over to put this thing together. So, uh, you're gonna need four pieces cut down at 20 inches, and you're gonna need the two pieces you need to get to in caps on again. The caps are not necessary. I just added in caps it just gives that finish polish. Look, and you're gonna need one piece at seven and 3/4. You're gonna need another piece at seven inches. You're gonna need another piece at the I'm sorry, honey to pieces at five inches, two pieces at three and 3/4 inches and you're gonna need six elbow joints. And you also going to me to t joints the timer is not necessary. But I just thought this to add a little extra to it. And also, this will probably come in handy if let's say, for instance, you walk away and you forget the time that you set for the exposure and you come back a little too late. Hoops, your screen is pretty much, uh, pretty much overexposed. And there's no way you gonna get the, uh you don't be able to wash out the stencil out of the screen. So once you said once you plug this end to the wall and you plug this to you blood the light to the apple, it here and you plug this into a wall socket and you can set the time and then you can start to set the start time in the end time, and then it will pretty much start your exposure, and then it will stop your exposure unit at the correct time. You sit for your exposure time, so and you're going to need two U boats, and you're gonna need a since hyper French of some sort and again, just use whatever you have laying around the house. And you can either use a drill if you have one, and I still happen to have a small one. So I This is my weapon of choice. So you can use, uh, screwed Phillips head screwdriver. And I'm using us Phillips head a bit for this drill. And of course, you're going to need ah ha login, uh, work like and again they come and different, um, Watts. This one Eyes 500 you can get it up to 1000. Uh, this is what I was able to get at this particular moment. Settled for this. And the other thing that you're gonna need is a piece of glass and again don't have to go out and buy us a piece of glass specifically for this purpose. If you choose to, that's that's that's totally fine. But if you have a piece of glass laying around the house most often, you could use picture frame glass. So this is where this actually came out of it. This came out of a picture of frame that I had laying around the house just to illustrate this thing's purpose. So you don't have to necessarily go out and purchase any excess material because it's not necessary. So the other thing you have to make sure off with the glasses to make sure wherever you get it from, just to ask if the glass has UV protection on it. If it does, you need Teoh. Find a different source to basically find one that doesn't have the UV protection on it, because this is the UV protection they put on. The glass will well actually block the UV light that's coming out of this college in work like so it could potentially damage your exposure time that he had set for your exposure. So that's the only other thing that I would check, double check and make sure and one other thing to you could always go to, Ah thrift store, and you could always purchase a picture frame and just pop out the glass. And you could use the glass fairly, an inexpensive method. And again, we're trying to not go over budget. Um, so those are a few tip. It's that I have for this part. So let's get started on the next face, actually putting the pieces together, so I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Assembling The Exposure Unit: Hello, and welcome back to the class. This part of the lesson, we're gonna actually start putting this piece of a puzzle together. Eso Let's begin. For now, I'm just gonna push thes other elements society because we really don't need them at the moment. This will give us a little bit more room to work. And so let's start off with the seven and 3/4 and we're gonna take us a T joint insert on one side of the 7 3/4 Then we're gonna repeat that on the opposite side with the other t joint, and then we're gonna take the three and 1/4. Now we're gonna insert that on the opposite side of the T joint, and then we're gonna repeat that with the other 13 3/4. So you have something that kind of looks like this, and then we need to Teoh an elbow joint, insert that into the three and 3/4 piece, and I'm gonna repeat that on the opposite side. So you have something that kind of looks like this and this is the beginning of our base and they want to take to the to 20 inch pieces with the caps. This is gonna serve as our leg. So we want to take that and insert that into the elbow joint and you want to slightly tap it in place. And then we're gonna repeat that money on the opposite side. So you kind of have something that looks like this. And then now we want to take the other 2 20 inch pieces. We want to insert them into the T joints, and then we want to take the other elbow joints. We want to place them on top of 20 inch piece. And then after that, we want to take the five inch pieces. We want to insert them into the elbow joint. So this is fairly easy to put together. You don't need any tools. So we want to continue inserting Thea other five inch piece. No. And then we want to take the last two elbow joints way. Want to place them facing one another way? Want to take the last piece, the seven inch piece, and then we want to insert it to the two elbow joints. Just want squeezing together. So and this is pretty much what you're gonna use as your base for your exposure unit. The light will be clamped onto this piece here. And this is your base where you would put your screen onto so that pretty much concludes this part off because of the construction part of putting the PVC pieces together. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Completed Exposure Stand: Okay, so we've constructed our PVC pipe light fixture. Stand to house our our collagen work. Like you can go a step further. You could actually make this more of a permanent picture without the pieces so the pieces don't move. You could buy plumbers, PVC glue. This will pretty much seal the pieces together. Just keep in mind. If you go that route, you won't be able to take to take it apart. So that pretty much concludes this part. So I will see you in the next lesson. 5. Attaching The Light: How long? Welcome back to class. We're nearing the final stages of the project. The next thing we need Teoh do is we need to take our allergen work light and we need to fix it onto our exposure us stand that we made earlier. So let's get started. So first thing we need to do is we need to turn the light fixture where it's facing us. And then we want to take one of the U bolt and we want to place it underneath. I found this is the easiest way of attacking it. And then we want to take the flat piece of the U ball. And then now we want to take the the Bolts and we want to just screw them in. We just just to start with, we just want a hand, tighten them, then we've been coming later with the wrench and tightening a little bit further. It doesn't have to be extremely tight just tight enough to hold it. And now we want to take the other you bought, and we want a place on the opposite side and we want to take the other flat piece. They want to repeat the same step again. All we need to do his hands high in tight it at this particular this particular face and just want to incitement. And they now want to take our light kind of tilted over a little bit. And then now come in entirely just a little bit more. Would only we don't need to overtime it just just tight enough to hold the light fixture in place because you have to remember, this is still plastic. If we tighten it too much, it might bend the plastic so we don't want to tighten it too much, then with position it whichever way we want afterwards. But that's pretty much that's pretty much the That's pretty much it. ASUs Faras. It's tolling, attaching the, um, the light to the stand. So I think you see it doesn't take much to put this together, so this pretty much concludes this part. I'll see you in the next chapter 6. Pre Exposure process: Hello. Welcome back to the class. This part of the class, we're gonna actually put our hard work into a real world situation. We're gonna utilize our explosion that to burn our screen. But before we can get started, there are a couple of things that I wanna touch on. The first thing is, we wanna take extra precaution and extra care while handling our light. Especially now we don't have the glass in the unit. We removed the glass 444 specific reasons just because this particular light source uses and it generates a lot of heat, we don't wanna accidentally touch the light that could potentially burn us. And, you know a few other things that could potentially happen. The next best thing that you could do this actually comes in with the unit. This has a guard. You can actually place the guard back into the unit, so you could, So this will prevent you from accidentally touching or accidentally having the light come into contact with any obscured objects. So this is another you know, another way to protect the light and protect your protect your hands and anything else. So I do recommend putting this back on, um, I want and I don't choose to, but I do recommend you putting this back on just for safekeeping. So that pretty much covers that part and again. In an earlier video, I mentioned the usage off a self timer. This will come in handy, is not necessary. And also, when we're about to expose our screen, we definitely do not wanna work in under regular under a regular light source. We definitely wanna work under a subdued light source something similar or something such as a yellow light Safelite. This will prevent any damage to our coated screen. So that's the next thing we wanted to extra care when handling are quoted screen with the emotion because the emotion is extremely sensitive to light. So any other light source that comes into play could potentially damage are, um, screen. So we want to take extra care with that. So we would definitely want to work under a yellow like a safe flight, um, to prevent any further damage to our emotion. So let's move on to the next thing now that will get that out of the way. We can move on to the next thing. So the next thing is, I mentioned the phone in an earlier video. This is what? The phone you can get a piece of foam similar to this. It's actually grayish a grayish black. You can put a piece of black felt on here. Black T shirt. You can paint it black. It's this out. This is entirely up to you and again. This isn't, um this isn't meant mandatory, but I do recommend it. It will save you some headaches. So this is, uh this is how you would pretty much use this unit with the foam. So what I ended up doing, I cut my foam an inch smaller than this conference off my screen, which the screen them that I like to use current that I like to use is 20 by 24. So you want to place the phone down first, and then you want to lay our screen excite down onto our foam, and then we want to come and then we want a place, our transparency film, wherever our destination will be, that is, that will be entirely up to you. And then we want to come and take our glass and place or glass over our transparency film. So now we have an excellent bond between our foam, our mesh on our screen, the transparency in the piece of glass. And again the phone is serving as a cushion, uh, for glass. And this will take the X the excess stress off our our mesh. And it also will prevent Sometimes you might lift the glass accidentally in the wrong way, and they could possibly poke a hole and ding ah, hole into your into your mesh. So use utilizing the phone is a good option. And it will also give you a good bond again. As I mentioned, we don't want light leak underneath our transparency film in our emotion causing light leaks. So this is the ideal situation that we want Teoh to work under. So this is pretty much it on this particular part. So I'm gonna move onto the next phase. I'm gonna turn off my regular light, and I'm going to be using my, uh, Safelite my yellow light. So if PSA video might seem a little dark if you notice the the light changed, that's the cause of it is because I'm working under a safe yellow light. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Exposing The Screen: Hello. Welcome back to the class. I do apologize for the little light. It's only because we're working under a subdued Safelite, just like before. The the steps in the process is is the same. The phone goes on the bottom, and then we want to put our screen the Exide down. It's like so and then our transparency film goes at this particular moment. I'm not really concerned about the positioning. And then now are glass goes on top. And for this particular time, I'm not gonna use the timer. I'm going to set my time for 10 minutes. Hit, Start, turn my light on after the 10 minutes will come back after 10 minutes are 10 minutes is up . Turnout for a light. Then I'm gonna take this to the wash up sink, so I'll see you in the next phase. 8. Washing out the Stencil: Okay, so now we're back at the washout booth. And again, you don't have to have any expensive tools. You know, this is basically I'm just just to illustrate this, I'm showing you that I'm washing this out of storage bin to wash out our screen. So just for this purpose, I'm just gonna illustrate this. So let me show you how this process goes. So you want to basically just spray a little bit way, flip it over way? Just want to let this We just want to let our screen sit for, uh, roughly about a minute. Just let everything settle, and then we can go back in and want to spread. We don't want to pay too much attention to the inside of our screen because it's more of the sensitive side. So we want to pay more attention on washing our screen. Our stance allowed more on the side. I mean, the print side off of our, um, of our screen so that we're not putting too much stress on the ink side of our screen because it has been exposed less to light. This side has been exposed more to light, so we want to pay more attention to this particular side. Want to pay more attention to the to the print side as opposed to the inside? So let's continue. You could see our sense till you could start to see our stencil. It starts starting to reveal itself. So, as you could see at this point, this is when you would take your screen, you would hold it up against some type of light just to double check to make sure everything got washed out properly. And then after that, you want to go ahead. You want to blot out the excess water and your screen. You want to make sure you want to remove all the water out of our screen because the the water may still be a carrier for a thin haze of the emotion. And if you let that dry in your stencil area, you open area that could potentially block your your your stencil area. So that could potentially damaged your open area. So you want a block out all the water. Another thing you could do. You could use a hair blow dryer, a heat gun on low, or you can use if you have one. You can actually use. But again, the best solution is to blot it out first. And then possibly, if you do have a hair dryer or, ah, heat gun, you can put that on low heat and then kind of dry your screen just to evaporate all of the moisture that might be trapped inside of your open area, your stencil area. And that should pretty much cover it. That should pretty much take care of all the of all the moisture. And so that's pretty much it. So, as you could see, we just use our exposure unit that we just built. The exposure time is roughly around 10 minutes, and it's pretty. It did a pretty awesome job. 9. Outro: Thank you so much for taking this class. I hope the information provided was informative. And the information shared in this class will help move you closer to your goals. Please check out the additional information provided with this class. And also please don't hesitate to contact me with any additional information. And once again, thank you very much for taking this class. I'll see you soon.