Screen Printers Open - A Forum for Screen Printing and Embroidery

Welcome to the forum.

I have seen people make their own curved screens for doing this but then you need to figure out how to expose the thing as it will not lay flat on an exposure unit and hold the film tight to the screen.

I have also seen people print these with what I call a modified bottle printer. With this method you use a flat screen. The squeegee remains still and the screen moves along with the skateboard blank as it travels thru the printer.

Either way it is a interesting process.

Screen printed boards are definitely preferred by experienced skaters. Exposing curved screens is a hassle. Some shops just glue the positive to the screen. Back in the day I vacuum bagged mine. You can go pretty detailed in your art, but the relatively loose screen material, the odd shape and the non wet on wet printing do not lend themselves to really detailed art.
here is a link to the all time classic instruction that used to be found on Bowlrider.com This link is to a copy on the WayBack Machine. There are a few pics that don't display, but they relate to washing out the screens, so it is no big.

I can't get the link to work from here and open the right page. It seems to be an issue with the archive website itself. If you want to check out this skateboard printing tut go to http://www.archive.org/web/web.php  and then enter www.bowlrider.com in the Wayback Machine box. Choose the year 2003 and then select the last web crawl date for that year. The bowlrider page opens. Select continue. On the next page select "screen'n" from the menu bar. "Printing the D20 Way" opens.

A lot of skate decks are now printed on the veneer topsheet then the boards are pressed. But that puts you in the board making business. Have fun!