From Provocraft, the company that produces Cricut and Cuttlebug, Yudu is a tabletop screen-printing system that aims to make the screen-printing process easier and less messy. I was up late last night with Lauren trying to print t-shirts for her and her mom to wear during the Seattle Breast Cancer 3-Day using the Yudu. That was a mistake. Yudu, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways…
1) Incomplete instructions. We caught wind that the online instructional video is more helpful than the instructional video disc included in the box. Why distribute a mediocre demo video in the box if you have a better one on your website? Why isn’t the good video being slipped into the packaging? Even worse, as we read through the included instruction booklet we were encouraged to DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE BOOKLET ONLINE. Time out. You mean people don’t get the full booklet when they pay for one of these things? For $300 plus tax I don’t think a booklet with complete, detailed instructions is such a ludicrous demand. As we worked through the instructions to execute our project there was little information about how long to dry and expose the screen, nor any good information about how to apply the paint or print using multiple colors. As first-time Yudu users we were utterly lost and completely fed up. If Provocraft were a foreign company I may have chalked this up to poor translation, but as this company is run out of (you guessed it) Provo, Utah, I feel there is no excuse for this failure.
2) The Yudu parts are poor-quality Allow me to break it down by part.
-Screen: the borders of the screen are merely plastic with metallic leaf applied to it, which bubbles and flakes as you handle it.
-Lid: The screen fits onto pegs and under a small lip (2″x1/2″ piece of plastic) on the movable lid, but when you raise that lid between applications the screen moves about because the pegs don’t hold the screen firmly and the tiny piece of plastic affords too much wiggle room. What it needs is a snap feature.
-Squeegee: It’s useless. A good screen-printing squeegee is rectangular-shaped and rubbery. The user should be able to use both hands. Yudu’s squeegee is made from cheap plastic and its rounded trapezoid shape forces the user to use one hand, or two hands too close together. Either way the paint distributes unevenly because the user puts all his/her pressure in the center of the squeegee, causing the sides to be fainter. Valuable tip: BYOSqueegee.
-Paint: It was too thick and dried very quickly. We only printed 6 shirts and I think we went through half a bottle of the black paint because we had to constantly flood the design, then drag, then repeat. Instead of reusing clean, shiny, wet paint collected on the squeegee we found ourselves trying to spread leftover semi-solid gloops from our trapezoidal joke of a squeegee. Not exactly optimum conditions.
-Drying/heating rack with timer: This one’s a multi-part doozy! The “instructions” told us to dry the wet screen (with emulsion sheet applied) for 15-20 minutes in the drying rack. So we opened the drying rack and saw two slots we could slide the screen on but only one gave way to the full screen and of course the instructions said nothing about which slot to use. The only slot we could really use was the top slot. No word about which side of the screen should have faced up. Fifteen minutes became an hour. When we removed the screen to check every 15 minutes we had to maneuver around this latch that held the dryer door shut, lest we bump the screen and possibly scratch the drying emulsion off. We don’t really know how long our emulsion took to dry…the timer on the product didn’t count off. We set it to multiple time settings, but apparently for the Yudu time stands still when the emulsion is drying. Instead we set timers on our phones to keep track. The timer DID work when we went to expose our design on the emulsion …but of course the instructions didn’t tell us how long to expose it. No, we had to go online to figure that out.
3) Don’t even bother with this thing if you want to have more than one color on your design. To print a second color on the item, the user should wash the screen of the first paint color and then apply the second . The idea is to be able to reuse one screen for each item and each color used. Sounds easy, right? Not so much. Our design was mostly black with two pink breast cancer ribbons intertwined with part of the design. After printing the black paint on all 6 of our shirts we prepared our screen for the pink paint by washing and drying the screen, then taping off all the parts of the design that did NOT need pink paint on it. After the prep, though, we found it extremely difficult to line our screen up with the part of the design that was already printed, thanks to that awesome moving lid…the user can’t tell if something is lined up perfectly under the screen until the screen is nearly directly over the item, which is about 1/2″ above. By that point the screen is already bearing down on the top portion of the printed item. If you determine you must move your printed item to match with the screen you must lift the screen and move the item, lower the screen and check, repeat repeat repeat into oblivion. And just when we thought we’d gotten it perfectly lined up…the second color ended up being off by a decent 1 1/2″. It was frustrating to say the least.
All in all it took a couple of smart, intuitive and savvy women five hours to print one color on 6 t-shirts with a machine that touts itself as being “the easiest, cleanest” screen-printing system out there. I admit it was pretty clean, but I’d take ease and speed over cleanliness any day, and those qualities were not found in my experience with this system last night. Lauren plans to apply the second color to these shirts using freezer paper so she can be more accurate. Yes that’s right…she determined she’d have better results doing it by hand!
Grade: D. Only use Yudu if you have a single-color design, a day to kill, and a couple of aspirin.
(Wanna donate to Lauren’s Breast Cancer 3-Day walk? It’s not too late. Check out Team PK’s Breast Cancer 3-Day donation site for info. Every dollar makes a difference!)
