I've actually been looking at this pretty hard over the last couple of days. I have some old artist's canvas frames I salvaged from an alley garbage heap, and apparently simpler designs can be cut out of contact paper really easily and stuck to the mesh fabric screen you staple to the frame.

I think we could very easily set up a basic screen print arrangement in just a couple of hours for our tees. The key would be picking an "easy" shape to do.

Don't you need some sort of uv light source to make the screens?

That depends on how you want to do it.

I'm thinking contact paper with the shapes cut out for starters, but even if you want to do a photoresist type of thing, you can get away with using the sun for it.

Mike: Please photodocument your screen-printing setup & results. This sounds like excellent worklog material.

Speaking of screen printing:

Free plans for building a 4 color screen printing station
http://www.printingplans.com/

that's what i was trying to describe on wednesday. they've done a great job of documenting their build.

A couple things I was thinking about, no idea about how realistic they are.

First a couple relatively easy ones for composites work:
- Vacuum Bagging Setup (apparently these are used for veneering too, spoon-a-pult with no clamps).
- Curing oven

These I'm not so sure about:
- Sand blasting booth for removing paint or rust
- Powder coat setup (this would also require an oven)

The powder coating oven at tech shop was just a cheap one they had 3 temperature gauges on there because none of them were all that reliable. Which leads me to believe it's not rocket science, but the poweder coating gun is something to be scared of 7000 volts!!

The sandblaster can also etch granite. I once had a summer job for a tombstone company and we used a sand blaster (with rubber stencils) to 'carve' the stone. Much like a laser, you can either carve in deep or simply engrave.

sand blasting and powder coat:

powder coat is the only way to do certain types of finishes, and while it can be a bit of a mess, imho a paint(ing) room could contain it (it's a static deposition process, so the vast majority of the powder only hits the target) and a positive pressure double door will keep the mess in and all the voc sprays going into a air filter/outdoors. realistically, we want a NFS (not food safe) oven for things like plastic slumping anyway, so podwercoating things that'll fit in one is easy.

sand/bead blasting it's an outstanding way to clean certain things, and add a LOT of textures. there are contained units with glove boxes that i think would be what we'd want. could roll them out on to the dock if a big item needed to be done.