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noob question:
when you have the board in your hands, how do you spot a heat transfer vs a screen printed board ?
There’s a dimension/thickness to ink that’s printed directly onto the deck. Even with screen-printed heat transfers, you can still see the edge of one color under another and details like that, which you don’t really get with digitally printed transfers. I think the act of heating and pressing the transfer flattens the ink out a bit vs. a direct screen print as well.
The reason boards aren’t screen printed much any more is because of the concave. You need a decently flat surface to get a good print, so the only boards you see screened today are reissues that have wider, flatter surfaces and mellower concave, or small graphics like that Black Ohio deck (gotta pick one of those up if I can find it).
From that early BBS / Grant Burns video, I think he was saying something about it, and it costs a lot less to produce the graphics on flat beds in much the same way as screen printing and then heat transfer them to the boards, so it keeps costs down as well.
I seem to recall they used to do it by hand, but then they changed to automated machines to do the graphics, which are still done one colour at a time for the most part.
You can see on some boards that the very last layer is often the white backing (closest to the wood once finished) and other layers are on top of that, no particular order that I could see, but there could be something to it, black first, then other colours, then white last, when they print to the heat transfer film which is then applied to the board when done.
It is the other way round when printing directly onto boards, white first, everything else and black last.
Screen printed boards just smell a lot different too - smell like fresh paint no matter how old, as per the Blind reissues from a while back, where they released the screen printed versions and the heat transfers. When you have two boards with the same graphic, it is easy to tell the differences and yes the screen printed paint is thicker on those ones too.
Skull and banana boards, orange screen printed and blue was the heat transfer. It was easier just to link the two Instagram posts, than try to dig out the original pics, but I still have all those boards too.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BhsoPnvl3cF/https://www.instagram.com/p/BnaiQCqhbwd/