Spending too Much on Your Yudu? Well, YuDon't Have To. :)

I decided to write this post because someone had written in one of the forums I belong to about how expensive it is to have a Yudu, and my response was, it doesn't have to be if you are willing to ignore the hype around direct-from-Yudu supplies.  Someone asked for more detail, so I thought instead of writing a lengthly reply that only one person would see, I'd blog about it in length for everyone to see!


So screen printing requires the following components:

1. A mesh screen (either 110 or 220 – that measures how fine an image you can get, like pixels)
2. Emulsion (this is what will carry your image on the screen)
3. An image to burn (typically drawn or printed on transparencies)
4. A way to “burn” the images (some sort of light box)
5. Ink for printing
6. A platen (this is what you hold the material with while you’re printing)
7. A way to apply the ink on the design (like a squeegee)
8. Emulsion remover (to clean the screen when you’re done & want to make a new design)

All of those things Yudu will sell. When you first get the Yudu, what should come in your box is a little bit of everything, so let’s say for $200, you get one screen, 2 emulsion sheets, one transparency, 2oz of black ink, 1 platen, and a squeegee. So everything you need to get going is in the box. However, if you want to keep going, you need more stuff. Let’s start at the top.

1. The mesh screen:
Yudu will provide you with one screen that’s 110 mesh. This is fine for large, one color designs. So if you only want to print in black, you’re good to go! If you want to overlay 3 or 4 colors, you need 1 screen per color. It’s kind of like an inkjet printer, you have one cartridge per color. If you want to do really fine lines & details or small fonts, you need a different screen at 220 mesh. Extra screens run about $20.00. I have about 4 screens total; I don’t buy them from ProvoCraft - I look around for deals, but they are still “Yudu” branded. You could make your own screens with just mesh you get at an artist supply store, but so far my laziness has prevented me from doing that.

2. Emulsion:
There are two ways to apply emulsion. Yudu uses “capillary sheets” which is basically emulsion suspended into a sheet that feels like contact paper until it gets wet. The other way is to use liquid emulsion & apply it with a “scoop coater”. The Yudu sheets are EXPENSIVE at $10.00 each, and you can ruin one pretty fast by using too much water or not enough to bond it to the screen. I ruined my first one right out of the gate. :) Liquid emulsion you buy by the quart, and it goes on in a very thin layer. When you burn the emulsion to the screen, you can use it many many times to print the same image, but you cannot reuse emulsion once it’s applied to the screen. So you get 1 screen per emulsion sheet, and somewhere around 30-50 screens from a quart of liquid emulsion. A quart runs about $25, so it’s about 50 cents to $1.00 per screen. The emulsion is light sensitive which is explained further.

3. An image to burn:
Simple transparency paper will do. You’re exposing the emulsion to light, so where it is exposed, it will harden & fill the mesh holes, and where it is covered by your image, it will stay pliable & rinse away. Yudu comes with a couple of transparency sheets, but if you want to print a variety of images you’ll need more. You can get them in a 5 pack from Yudu for around $15, or you can get a 100 pack of transparencies for $25 from an office supply store.

4. A way to burn the image:
This is the Yudu unit itself. You can’t beat the price really for this compact unit. Occasionally you’ll need to replace the light bulbs. These are just standard fluorescents you can get from Home Depot.

5. Ink for printing:
Just like printers, ink is where they make their money! Buying Yudu inks will cost you somewhere between $7-10 for a 3oz bottle. The original unit only comes with a little bit of black, so if you want to print more colors, you’ll need different inks. You can switch to another waterbased ink like Speedball, Permaset, or Matsui. Costs vary a little bit, but with Permaset for example I can get 11 oz for $10; Matsui is about $20 for 16oz.

6. A platen:
This is basically just something to hold the material you’re printing on. The Yudu comes with one, so I wouldn’t worry about having new ones unless you are printing shirt sleeves or something small. After I print something I just remove it from the platen & clip it to a clothesline to dry.

7. A squeegee:
The Yudu comes with one, so this isn’t really a big deal to replace unless you want to.

8. Emulsion remover:
Yudu sells this separately, you don’t really need it until you’re done with an image or you can’t get good prints anymore. Yudu sells this in a 3oz bottle for $24; you can get 5 oz of Saatichem for $10.

So just based on pricing, getting started is a pretty modest investment; to keep going will cost more.  How much more really depends on how much volume of printing you're planning to do.  If you only want to print in one color or one design, what comes with the Yudu is OK for that.  If you aren't printing that much, then you don't really need 10 oz of ink or 100 transparencies.  So you have to really decide which components are worth saving money on and which ones are not.  If you do nothing else though - consider switching to liquid emulsion. For me this decision was about the cost of my mistakes, and if you mess up coating a screen (which is really the foundation of this whole process) I just liked the economics better of throwing away quarters instead of ten dollar bills.

Good luck!!

To endless possibilities,

Ebony