Making a Squeegee for Print Screen – The Blade

The squeegee is the other part of the basic screen printing equipment. In a manual and artisanal context, the frame and squeegee can be considered as the screen printing machine – the former supporting the image matrix to be printed and the latter operating actively and directly on the former, in order to reproduce that image by pressure exerted on the ink and through the mesh. The squeegee is a piece consisting of a part, usually made of wood or aluminum – the handle – and a part made of rubber or synthetic plastic – the blade -, with the purpose of distributing and pressing the ink during printing, constituting the most active tool in screen printing.

Inappropriate types of rubber, as well as worn or damaged material, will not allow for a uniform ink transfer, seriously compromising the registration and definition of the print. This is also not an expensive piece, regardless of the handle. To build a squeegee at home, pine wood once again becomes the most popular material, and, whether buying or making the squeegee, the factors to consider are related to the size, type, hardness, and cut of the blade material.

The materials used in squeegee blades are generally of four basic types: natural rubber, nitrile rubber, neoprene (a synthetic polymer similar to rubber), and polyurethane (a synthetic plastic material). Natural rubber tends to have low resistance to abrasion and strong solvents – it is more commonly used in the educational aspect of screen printing. Nitrile rubber is more or less at the same level as neoprene, although it is slightly less expensive and less resistant to temperature and abrasion, but both are superior to natural rubber (due to better resistance to friction and chemical aggression) and are suitable for short printing periods, which are widely used in manual screen printing. Although more expensive than other options, polyurethane blades offer much better resistance to both physical and chemical abrasion, making them the most popular on the market for all applications. Polyurethane is even used to make squeegees designed for prolonged use, applied to automatic equipment and printing with high chemical aggression. Polyurethane also has an ecological and lower-cost line, formulated for applications with low chemical aggression, based on water-based and eco-solvent inks.

This article is just a small compilation of samples from an e-book sold on this website, but its first edition is only available in Portuguese.

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