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Studio Tour

we were here. Mama Sauce Print Shop in Orlando, Florida My name's Hogan and I'm gonna give you a quick tour of the shop and kind of studio way are a spot color print shop that specializes in silkscreen printing, letter press printing and hot oil stamping. We've been around for about six years or so in the spot color department only, and this is our newer space. We've been here for about six or seven months. I think so. It's about a little under 5000 square feet in this warehouse space and show your own. So here we are are kind of first main warehouse. So what happens in years are finishing department. So this is where all the paper is handled before printing and after printing definitely starts off over where the papers pulled off the shelves, you can see we've got all of our papers ready to pull. Some of them are how stocks Some of them are just extra papers that we have around from over orders. So John will go ahead and pull the paper based on the work order and how much paper has to...

be pulled and what size it needs to be cut down. Two to go to the press is so trimmed that down to size it will go off to production. And sometimes it will actually go to pre duplex ing, where we'll be gluing those two sheets together to make either multiple colored papers on each side or double thick, triple thick papers once had been printed. They will come back to this department again to be trimmed and finished the final size. So that's either gonna happen again with John on the cutter or here with Katie on the die cutter. So here we are, over at the Clooney, which again, like I was saying, is used for die cutting. This machine is actually in American made press similar to the letter press machines, and it's a Platen press, but it's actually mainly used for die cutting can print with thinks, but it just doesn't really do the best job at it. So we use it for die cutting. So right now it's basically set up is a glorified cookie cutter, so you can see we've got the print on here and she's got it registered up with the dye place in there so that what I can do is pop this out. This goes away, and then we've got a really nice custom die cut piece. It's got a really cool, little unique look to it again making use of these machines for not their original intended purpose. But it works really well. For once, everything has been trim to final size, either through die cutting or with paper cutter. It'll come over here to the quality control table, so this is pretty much where all of the jobs come after they've been trimmed. Final size. You can see this kind of big stacks of stuff posters, business cards, wedding and by its kind of everything comes here at once. So are amazing. Interns take their time looking through every single print and making sure that all of the bad prints or misprints get pulled out if possible. A lot of times with these processes with letter pressed on with screen printing, you'll get a lot of paper dust in there that gets caught in the screen for so screening or, in letter, press the skin. Very so we like to try to keep things as consistent as possible, and these were the main factor in making that happen. So we're back here in the main production warehouse. You can see and hear all the press. Is your back here running on? And so this is our letter press department here. So that's where all the letter press printing happens as well as oil. Stamping that machine in the back corner is the oil press. These other ones are our main production letter. Press machines. Got a few other presses over here, one being our cylinder press for letter breasts in a little small Chandler and right hand fed press. Yeah, these are pretty incredible machines that are all from the fifties to sixties old. Technology is still working really well for what we dio. Really. It's the best way to print that kind of quality work. So this presses from the early sixties, the Heidelberg windmill, definitely the pinnacle of its time in terms of printing in general. Really great registration. It can register. Color is really, really close together, and it's pretty fast too, so you can kind of see why they're calling it a windmill. You've got these two arms that are kind of swinging around like a window does what those arms are doing are picking up the paper, beating it into the press and then pulling it back out of the press to return the paper. A lot of working parts on these machines. So this letter press machine is what typically is used when you see really high end wedding invitations that have the artwork actually pressed into the paper where you can feel that pressed in. So not only is it really great at doing really, really fine lines and find type, but it gives it that really nice high end luxury fuel by having it be something that's truly not digitally printed, more offset printed being that it's actually physically being pressed into the paper. Over here, we've got our still screen printing press or screen printing. Press differs from typical screen print process that people are used to seeing, which is typically the T shirt press. This machine is a one color press, so it's a flatbed screen printing press that semi automatic it pretty much only does the blood and the whole of the screechy as the automatic process. You can see Tim is actually feeding each heat on my hand, and then Brandon is pulling you cheat off and checking as he's pulling to make sure nothing is happening with the print on press. So it's a pretty involved process. You can see the doing a run here of about 500 posters, I think that are either five or six colors. So they're on, I believe one of the last few colors. So a lot of going into this poster already and it doesn't even really look that finished. You can see here, this is before the color that they're printing now. So you've got three colors down on this right now. This is a French craft own paper, but you can still see. We've got some really nice bright colors on that paper, which is again why? Scream friend is really awesome. You get those nice, bright colors on darker craft color papers for packaging and stuff like that. Somebody you guys back into the, uh, the screen print dark room, if you will. So this is where all the screens are prepared. Four burning on where they get exposed. Toe have stencil of the artwork placed on. It's a dark room in the sense that these lights are Actually, they have UV filters on them, so it's not necessarily like a dark room unit seeing in a photography studio. If the UV rays would be coming into here, it can affect the screens and cause them to preemptively expose themselves. You can see we've got a bunch of screens here, that air either already been burned or are coated with an emotion and ready to be exposed. When I say emotion. What that is is it's a material that gets applied to the screens that's sensitive to light, and until that material gets exposed to UV light, it actually stays soft and can just wash out of the screen with water. So what we do is we come over here to this explosion tape of the year, and we take a film. So this, for example, is a film for what looks to be a wedding invitation. So you can see is basically just a transparent film that has black ink printed on it, so that will get placed onto a screen that's ready to be exposed and take down really well. And then we'll go ahead and bring it in here. So this big table is where the screen goes so it actually flips up for us so that we can put the screen inside of it, flip it back up, lock it in, and then there's a vacuum that gets turned on. And with the vacuum is doing is it's creating suction between the screen itself and the transparent film that we just put on there. And what that's doing is it's making it so that no light can get in between those two pieces of material. Because if they do the lights gonna actually refracting go the wrong way and create a line that's not straight where it might kind of make a line bigger than it's supposed to be. So this crazy light goes right in front and gets turned on to expose the screen for a certain amount of time, depending on the artwork, depending on the screen. Count on in all of those things. We've got a bunch of different screens that have different mesh counts. When you hear the term mesh count, it relates to the actual fabric that's on the screen that has a certain number of holes per square inch. If you're looking at doing much finer type really fine lines, you would want to use a much higher mesh count because you want to get as much detail out of that line is possible without any stair stepping. Clemenceau You has a screen that has been exposed and is ready to go on press. This is actually for the poster that we're just looking at the guys printing out there. So what we've got is a screen that has a really, really high quality stencil where if you see the light kind of coming through where you're seeing, artwork is actually open material, so that's mesh that can allowing to get passed through there. You can see it's really, really fine lines on there, and we can really go down to a super super small, thin line we can actually handle all the way down to about a 0.35 point thick line, which is really, really small. It's less than half of a point. Think that screen we're just looking at back there was created using this film. So what's kind of cool that you can do is you can actually lay this down on top of the print that they're working on right now to get an idea of what the Post is gonna look like. Finish typically doesn't really work out because you're not looking at the color that's actually getting printed. But with this one, it's actually black. That's going down so you can see that this is pretty much what The Post is gonna look like when it's finished up. So oftentimes will use the film to make sure that all the colors were lined up really well and that they're gonna look good if they need to make an adjustment on the film. They could do that before exposing the screen. Awesome. Well, that's pretty much the shop here at Mama Sauce. Hopefully, you've got a good glimpse of kind of what we do here at the shop and how some of the processes work kind of on a quick little run around for so hopefully we'll see some your requests come through to the shop. We'd love to work with you, shoot us an email, and we'll take it from there. Thanks