halftone and mesh ratios

[TyrantDesigner]

It's been almost a decade since I've done lots of halftone design for screenprinting ... does anyone know a resource or two or know the good range of dot size to mesh counts? Trying to not have a 35 dot count per inch on a 110 mesh sort of thing. Right now I've been running them about 20-24 ddi on 200 mesh which does fine but seems to do wonky things on 110 sometimes so any help would be appreciated.

 

[Dennis422]

The rule is about 4-4.5 times the dot size.

So, 45 line would have to be at least on 190-200 mesh

 

[TyrantDesigner]

Thanks. Do you find certain inks (waterbased, discharge, high density, standard plastisol vs hybrid, etc, etc, etc) pass through certain halftone sizes better than with others? Cause it seems the high density needs a larger mesh and halftone to get the thickness it needs. So if you have any insights I would appreciate hearing them.

 

[Jeron]

Typically yes but the bigger mesh you go the less detail you'll hold.. Your better off to use the mesh you need to hold the detail for the image then thin your ink down to pass through the mesh. You will lose opacity but you can also print flash print to make up for it..

you basically want to go as big of mesh as you can and still hold the detail just fine.. then thin the ink to make it print better.