Screeny McScreenPress

Jonathan T. Le, lead student who created the FabApp, also brought a personal background of having run a small t-shirt printing business between high school and coming back to college to his role in the FabLab.

As the only two FabLab employees with serigraphy experience, Jon and FabLab Librarian Morgan Chivers discussed the FabLab’s screen printing capabilities, but were faced with a hefty hurdle. A 4-color press was both high-cost and would dominate a significant portion of the expanded lab, and alternatives would risk limited accuracy, thus narrowing appeal to learners on campus.

As a compromise, Jon and Morgan drafted a proposal to build a relatively simple, semi-disassemblable press based on an open-source set of plans.

Jon looked through the list of materials and found we could save some money by sourcing everything ourselves and buying online or from local hardware stores. We also identified a few design components that could easily be made far more robust for a little extra investment.

Following in this vein of conversation, we thought of several other features that could potentially be built into the system given the fact that the FabLab has a ShopBot and the initial designer of the open-source press was working with non-CNC tools.

With this recognition, Morgan and FabLab Director Katie Peery asked Jon to create a proposal for what the financial and temporal implications would be if we built the open-source press as designed, if we made a few modifications to the open-source press plans and built that, or if we designed additional micro-registration features and made more significant modifications to the design rooted in the open-source plans.

Jon’s evident excitement about the potential improvements to the plans and the thoroughness of the presentation convinced us to opt for the most modified version; however, surprise-to-nobody-by-now, this took longer than anticipated.

In addition to the normal process of reviewing designs and talking through problems before cutting, the physicality of this project brought another issue to the fore: student employees are permitted to work a limited number of hours each week. Though this slowed the pace of project, we abided this constraint to allow Jon to complete the screen press he was so devoted to, lovingly named Screeny McScreenPress, which is fully functional and customized with 3D printed components and storage space.

The press itself is currently one of the most prominent physical examples of student work housed in our space, and also helps to fulfill our expansion goal to incorporate more arts technologies into the lab.