A step wedge is the cheapest calibration in screen printing: patches from a few percent to solid, screened at your mesh frequency. Print it, burn it, pull one print, and you know exactly which tones your setup can hold — on fabric or on paper, which give very different answers.
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Patches outside the mesh's usable range are marked. They are printed anyway — the point of the wedge is to find out where your setup actually gives up.
Every mesh has a floor and a ceiling. Below the floor, a halftone dot is smaller than the openings in the fabric, has nothing to hold onto, and washes away. Above the ceiling, the white gaps between dots close up and the tone prints as solid. Between those two, you have a working tonal range.
Software can calculate where those limits should fall. Only a printed wedge tells you where they fall for you — with your emulsion, your exposure, your ink, your squeegee pressure and your substrate.
Write the two limits on the screen with a marker, along with mesh, emulsion and exposure. That single line of information ends most arguments about whether the software, the screen or the print was at fault.
This is why the substrate switch matters. A knit swallows small dots and gains heavily, so the usable range narrows — typically 12–88% at 156 mesh. A flat sheet of paper holds much finer dots with almost no gain, so the same mesh can carry a higher line frequency and a wider range. Run a wedge for each substrate you print on; they are two different measurements.
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