Remember When?

Indirect emulsions (5 star)
Letraset

Mmmm carbon arc....

Agfa repromaster cameras
Dark /red rooms
Brown film paint

American cameos, still have one....
White ink so thick you throw the ink out and grate the pot through the mesh.
Clothing suppliers with one page catalogs
Imported tee and polo styles that only came in a massive seven colour ways: white, black, grey, royal, red, forest green and navy.
Light tables, vivid and rotring sets, tracing paper.
Oh, and my favorite, six week leadtimes.........

Puff ink was modern and "in"
Glitter ink.
Folding the shoulder pads under so the heat didn't buggger them up.
Polycotton interlock tee fabric.
45 dpi tones
$500 for process film seperations
Pregan paste
$5 an hour wages
Locally made shirts, sewing factory upstairs, knitting fabric on the wildt mellor bromleys next door. Thinking wow, an imported shirt!!!
No transfers or vinyl cuts, print all the names and numbers.
Artwork in the post or by fax which meant you had to guess the stretch distortion of the fax machine and weather the design meant to have lines in it?
Thinning plastisol with turps (the other curable reducer)
Prints didn't ever have tm or (c) on them.
Sorts of shades and Colours, matching to some wrinkled paper before Pantone books.

Advance Process Supply wooden frames stretched with "Tite-Stretch Cord".
The first plastisol ink, U.S. Rubber (now Uniroyal) Deco-Flex ink.
McGraw #33 carbon tissue photo-stencil film.
Reinke screen presses (no flood bar, the squeegee came back around over the top of the screen, dripping ink as it went!).
The original Autoroll Company.
Zipatone sheets.
Goodkin, Robertson, and ATF cameras.
Switzer Brothers Day-Glo flourescent inks that you had to pay a license fee to print with.
Hardtfeldt screen presses from Sweden.
6xx Organdy mesh, less than $2.00 per yard, 48" wide.

WOW, I've literally never heard of any of this stuff. I've only been in the biz for 6 years. I am spoiled.

Well, I forgot that we have about 15 gallons of various puff inks on the shelf back in the shop that we got from an old shop that went under. We've never touched it for a real job, but I have played around with it.

Well Winston I dare say i have managed more shops with belt printers in conjunction with cut and sew factories than most on this board; ditto w/PJ. At one point I remember being stuck with 60 drums of thermochromic ink that went bad due to a failed program. Used Lettraset and stat cameras for film. Had those Spinart machines, and believe it or not back at the old Precision clandestine Artwave Mktg we had a program with Phillip Morris for three million shirts front and back.
Seems like eons ago

I remember a lot of the stuff mentioned but that was before I worked in actual screen printing, I originally started out on the supply side for a large distro that sold to both Textile and graphics printing. Not to mention we did a lot of custom in house stuff with chemicals and inks. We sold names like Inkdezyne, Coates, Manoukian, Dayglo and lots of others I long forgot.

Yep Urea good memory and yes they were pellets and stunk of Ammonia.

Sorry Tony I am pretty certain all the pigments are powder including the dayglo florescents but I will check to be sure.

Sh*t, I think I'm getting old. I was maybe 15 back then, but still remember a lot of those stuff you people mentioned. I had transferred tons of those big sheets of Letraset, letter by letter, while helping my father in the shop. Mostly water based inks (Manoukian, Minerva), white opaque water based ink was a real pain in the ***. I remember that brown film paint from the small tube, still have Agfa repro camera somewhere. Many times customers used to bring just a paper sketch of the design and we have had some engineer, good in technical drawing, to make the positives by drawing them with rapidograph sets on blank film.

Great thread, btw.

Don't class Manoukian as obsolete. If anyone prints vinyl stickers, aluminum, metals, even polyester coated products they have IMHO the best current series of solvent inks in the world. We use them for printing wine screw caps, the company I contract to produces about half the caps in the world, and it's the standard ink used. We have trialled others, but nothing beats the colour, adhesion and keying, and it stays open. Haven't ever used another comes remotely close in the environment we print in and substrate.

Argon printing machines.
Warped wooden pallets
Shimming the squeegee on the TAS to arc over the warped wooden pallets in some kind of parallelness......
Ceramic elements
Beverly Hills 90210 Sweats
Don't worry - Be happy on tie-died singlets.
Garfield.
Snoopy.
Putting black key lines on everything to hide any gap in cut ruby seps and drawn designs. If the art was bad you just made the black key line thicker to join everything up.....
Sweats only came in crew or vee neck. Later with collar, and then hoodies.
Buying the tone in sheets to cut out.
Also Lines and stripe sheets.
I still have a letraset book. Actually I have boxes of junk from "back in the day"..... God knows what else is in them.
Clamps. Clamping got around the film exposed in the wrong place, pack and clamp, micro rego was a hammer. Who am I kidding, still is.....

Said the old man to the apprentice......"less talking and more listening for I have forgotten more than you have learned"......

Winston, there is comfort in common shared knowledge and histories. Sometimes experience gets us out of trouble when we have learned from our mistakes (although some don't and keep repeating them). Experimentation is great and technology is so better now from machinery to consumables. The end client has better outcomes in their work. If you ever open a 20 year old job bag up and look at the film and the print sample it's embarrassing, yet at the time it may have rated internationally in terms of quality and finish, yet today it would be rejected.....
Yet for all that, efficiencies and increased production I don't think we make more money or better lifestyle than we had then. Harder lead times, more stress, more overtime, 24/7 operations where it was forty hours then fishing with a beer.

I remember a face shield, elbow length rubber gloves and a full length rubber apron to de-haze screens.

First day:
"Why do I need all this stuff?"

After a pin-head sized dot of caustic haze remover paste gets on your skin:
"OH GAAWWD IT BURRRRRNSSSSS!!!"

what about DIGITIZING?

I remember blowing all art up to 600% on a Xerox copier and taping all the pages together.. marking each stitch with a pencil on the drafting table and then taping the entire mess to the Digitrac to virtually repunch the entire thing... only 80 stitches at a time though.. press the run button and sew on the melco superstar... IF you liked those 80 stitches you printed them on paper tape and went back to the digitrac for the next 80 stitches... there was NO editing. Computers were not available for digitizing. We learned to read the code on the paper tapes and would splice them as needed. And we also had paper punches that we would use by hand to modify as needed.

Facit machines anyone?

BUT we charged more than $25 per thousand stitches and got it! I remember jacket back logos costing $1800 for digitizing alone that today you could get for $95.