Wilflex Epic Performance White

[alan802]

I didn't want to derail Daryll's thread and figured this would be good for it's own thread.  I need to know why this white ink is $150/gal, $619/5 gal?  I looked it up at my Wilflex supplier and the price is insane.  I could be wrong but I seriously doubt it's twice as good as the white I'm using for $280/5 gal.  If it yeilded "one hits" on 90% of what you printed, I'd pay for it, but good lord that's the craziest price I've ever seen for a textile white ink.  I have used so many white inks over the past few years I have a hard time believing it's worth $150/gal or $619/5 gal.  Out of all the whites I've used, I can honestly say that even the cheap ones perform at no less than 75% of the most expensive whites.  Losing 25% can be a big deal for shops doing a lot of work, but if you're done printing for the week by Wednesday then using the budget whites is a better decision.  I understand if an ink is good enough to not require an additional revolution of the press, that's a huge benefit for any shop, but my experience has shown that even some of the worst inks we've tried have still performed decently to give us 100% opacity with PFP.  If you're not doing one hit whites often and if it's going to take print flash print for all of your work, even the cheap inks will accomplish that task quite easily with the right mesh counts.

All of you who love this ink, let me know why you love it so much, why you gladly pay that high price for it.  Does it flash in 1 second?  Great fiber matte down?  Best opacity in the world?  I just want to know if I need to drop 150 on a gallon to test it out or if the fans of this ink simply prefer it cause it does everything a little better, or if it performs twice as good as anything else you've tried.  Maybe you're not paying that much for it? 

[Orion]

Is this white one of the "top score" series? Maximum opacity, low cure temp and can stretch a mile without cracking. You should get Bill Warren from GSG to get you a sample.

[jvanick]

we pay 137 a gallon, so close enough to your 150 # I guess... 

it has worked better for us than anything else we've tried...

flashes fast, very low tack, doesn't climb the squeegees, works on all of our garments, stretches like crazy, and cures at a lower temp, so I don't have to worry about the specialty products quite as much.  We print on lulu-lemon blanks for a pilates studio in our area... at $50+ a blank, I don't want to worry about over-curing them...

I guess if I had time to experiment as well as 'cheap' samples, maybe I'd change my mind... but for now, everything I noted above is a huge plus in my book, then again, we go through less than a gallon of white ink a month, so the extra piece of mind for a few extra $$$ is worth it to us, if we were running 5 gallons a month or more, I'd be looking to cut costs.

[Sparkie]

I'm curious if anyone knows the difference between Top Score white ($87/gal my cost) and Performance white ($137/gal my cost)? Both are aimed at 100% poly performance wear with low bleed & low cure temp (290f).

I have not used the Wilfex Performance white all that much, but it does do a great job on 100% poly. I still prefer Wilflex Quick white as my go to white on all non 100% poly jobs.

I guess I'll be ordering a quart of Top Score white to see the difference for myself.

[ZooCity]

It's worth it and yes, we pay less than that Al. 

Performance is for poly and performance garments, there's no reason to use this ink (or any poly white) for other applications, there seems to be confusion on that.  We run Quick on everything possible and break out the Performance only when and where it's called for.

We run the whole Epic Performance line for poly's- White, UB Grey, Black, Base + PCs for colors.  We do need to add around 1-2% viscosity buster to the White and Grey at times. Our poly prints are smooth, stretchy, fully bridged, matte in finish and wash and wear like champs.   We've never had a run bleed out on us and while I still make a point to keep my crew extra concerned about temps every time we run polys, having good ink makes it about as laid back as you can get for this type of work.  It handles very well on press for an ink with these characteristics.

I pay more for this Wilfex ink because, when we run performance wear I can go to back of the dryer and say "that's the best possible print that could have been made for that art on this shirt" and mean it. 

Don't bother with the Top Score white, it's not up to snuff with the performance white.  We got a sample in and about three strokes in my printer pulled in and put the Perf White back in it's place.  It's inferior both on press and in finished print but, hey, it costs less.  The Top Score colors, at least the National Red, we've ran are very nice however.

[Binkspot]

Haven't gotten my hands on the Top Score White yet but the colors print like regular plastisol inks. Huge difference over the std Wilflex poly, not sticky, prints easy, clears the screen nice and will not stick to itself when it comes out of the dryer. Added bounous prints nice even if it's cold.

[ZooCity]

From Wilflex directly I was told that Top Score was designed for shops that didn't want to pay the cost for Performance and/or didn't have a long enough cool down at the back of the dryer.  It's basically ink designed for your classic athletic wear printers was the impression I got, i.e., numbering manually with a short dryer, that kind of situation.

What's nice about Top Score is they finally have spot colors available (in quarts no less) for shops that don't use PCs+Top Score or Perf base, that's big.

[alan802]

I didn't refer to it as a poly only ink so that's my fault on creating confusion.  I gasp at paying $100/gal for the expensive poly whites and right now I've got a good one that's $80/gal and just under $300 for a 5.  We print on poly and poly/cotton blends more than 50% of the time so we actually are using more poly ink than standard low bleed.  I don't keep a 100% cotton white ink around and have settled on using low bleeds for 50/50's (although most "low" bleed inks will bleed on the stuff we are printing on) for our cotton jobs.  I've tested so many low bleeds on 50/50's and they simply don't work with much consistency on the reds, blues and even some of the black garments, and it's not the dryer temps.  We can dial in the dryer temp and belt speed to reach whatever temp we want within several degrees of tolerance with the International and I'm constantly running the donut probe through and mapping temps now that I can.  I can put the dryer on the right settings for 50/50's as long as I'm using one type of ink but we aren't fortunate enough to be able to do that.  We have so much ink from so many different manufacturers.  I'd love to be running just the Top Score inks or the Lancer Athletic series and set the dryer to cure at 290 degrees and not worry about a thing, but I can't throw away hundreds of gallons of ink because there is something a little easier and better out there.  Every new gallon I buy is the new breed of low bleed spot colors but the amount of ink we use that's several years old at least would amaze you guys.  I picked out a blue ink that is 12 years old just this morning, it happens on a daily basis.

[JBLUE]

I have a qt of Top Score to test right now on a job. Excited to try it for its stretchability.

Alan we dont pay those kind of advertised prices for ink. If a shop is they need to grab their vendor by the nuts and do some shaking. If your not a hobby shop and use some ink they will give price breaks. If I had to pay full price I probably would though. The stuff is that much better. Especially if you look at the cost over the whole 5 gallons. There is a reason why everyone is complaining about these other cheap whites and switching back and forth all the time.

I look at it this way. The extra cost on some inks is not that relevant if you have to play with it to get it to work all the time. While someone else sits there playing with pressure, speed, angle, reducers, or some strange ink voodoo to get their cheap stuff to half way print nice. I would already be printing, making a much nicer final product, have less down time, and still make more money on top of it. It is all in that down time. Add up all the down time over that 5 gallons of cheap stuff and one could very well pay for the good stuff two times over. 

There are a half dozen or so reps that come by all the time trying to sell all the brands you can think of. They all know pretty well now dont ask me to try another white if they cannot put their money where their mouth is. They all know and agree to what I am saying. They see it and hear it from printers all the time. Especially after a switch from one to the other.

[ZooCity]

That's tough Alan.  I'm a stickler for keeping one ink system only, at least with plasti, I don't mind mix/matching wb.  In your shoes, my temptation would be to sort that ink out, sell off what you don't want and mix the rest into some house spot colors to run on cottons.  Then pick a mix system/brand and stick to it.  We literally do just what you described, set that dryer and go and our old dryer is about as far from the controls on a Sprint Int'l as you can get.   

I might argue that it's a more than "just a little easier" to do it this way and there are production savings that will outweigh the "loss" from selling off and/or delegating all that mixed stock ink to cottons.  Not to mention the benefits to be gained when printing WOW when you know for a fact each ink on your press is going to perform well WOW.

Me and JBLUE are dug into the same trench on this topic.  For the extra change we shell out for Quick and Perf white I've gained back probably thousands in increased production (or production not lost messing around with ink, however you want to look at it), not to mention clients who receive a better print then they've ever had on an order from other shops.  If you want to get all "fuzzy math" about it, that extra $X.xx I'm paying for the WFX ink (or any inks we dedicate to) is probably the highest ROI in our shop when you look at the overall picture.

[jvanick]

I've gained back probably thousands in increased production (or production not lost messing around with ink, however you want to look at it)

not to mention savings in alcohol consumption when you have a bad day and can't figure out why things aren't going well, or the savings in lost goods...

[alan802]

I subscribe to that thought process of not buying cheap products due to lost production, but this is a unique situation really.  We've got things dialed in with our cotton white ink, as well as the poly ink but not to the same degree, and the loss in production using an $80/gal ink versus the $150/gal ink is what I'd love to see.  It's unique in that I think we have a leg up with our mesh count usage and not that we don't have issues from time to time with something, but when it comes to printing white ink on darks...kind of our specialty.  We use white ink on about 80% of the jobs we print, lots of them are just white only designs but since we do it so often, we're not having to play around with the settings like it was back even 3 years ago.  For our cotton white I pay $100 more for a 5 than we did a year ago because of this exact reason a few you have mentioned, but we're stretching the numbers to a point that I have to ask the questions I did because of course I trust a lot of you guys' opinion on this matter.  It's going to have to be special at that price, and I'm leaning towards trying it out and making an effort to rough up my vendor a little bit for a better price.  First time I was quoted the Tidy white I had the same reaction, no damn way I'm paying $400 for my cotton white ink when I get one hit whites with the Miami ink quite often enough.  But after working the supplier I got a great price on what I think is as good of an ink as you guys think of the Perf. white.  I have a bottom line price that I'll pay for a great poly white and it's way under $600/5 gal because we are having no issues or lack of production with the ink we're using now but I'm always on the lookout for the best tools to do the job.  Price wouldn't be a concern if we were having problems and a new white ink would cure those issues, that's a no brainer, but again this is unique because of the extreme (in my opinion) price and current performance of our poly white ink.  I can get a little cocky and feel like we've got everything figured out and shun other ideas and opinions.  I get in that mindset from time to time but then I remember that I have to slap myself back to reality and understand that two heads are better than one, and 30 heads are exponentially better than two.

[dirkdiggler]

Performance white is like $120.  You can print regular plastisol on top of it with no problems on 100% poly.  I was told yesterday by a Wilflex dealer that the only difference between top score white and performance white is that Performance is glossy and Top score is matte.  I believe in performance, been using it for years!

[Sparkie]

...You can print regular plastisol on top of it with no problems on 100% poly.....

So when printing regular plastisol inks on top of performance inks, you cure at the higher 310F - 320F and have no bleed issues on your 100% poly?

[JBLUE]

...You can print regular plastisol on top of it with no problems on 100% poly.....

So when printing regular plastisol inks on top of performance inks, you cure at the higher 310F - 320F and have no bleed issues on your 100% poly?

Yes. We do it all of the time. I have seen shirts that we have done several years ago that look as good as the day they were printed.