Yesterday my rep from GSG came by and let me use a sample of white silicone ink from Imagestar. I think it's the same product (newer and advanced likely) that I used a few years back. I grabbed a few digi camo poly shirts from the rack and printed a left chest logo on a few shirts. I really like the ink, it can be printed as fast as your press will run and with as little pressure as your mesh and squeegee will allow. I don't have any hard evidence to this but it seems to have more "opacity per mil" (another made-up term of mine) and although I printed on the smoothest surface you can find in the 100% poly port & co, with a single stroke through a 135/48 yielded perfect one-hit whites. Our best plastisol white can achieve one-hits easily enough on most 100% poly stuff but I think the silicone ink is just a tad bit better and more opaque. The ink deposit is thinner as well. And the best part is it blocked the bleeding on the digi camo shirts which is VERY difficult to do with plastisol inks. It also held up nicely to the red, 100% poly port & co shirt that has brought some of our best poly whites to their knees. The PFP sample I did was so smooth and obviously a little thicker than the one-hit samples but still thinner than most all of the plastisol prints.
I wish it was more RFU and had a longer shelf life, not to mention the cost. At the high cost and the high probability of having a good bit of waste in the beginning I'll be trying it sparingly at first with a handful of jobs. It is also VERY quick to dry up. Not in the stencil necessarily but if you walk away from the press for 15 minutes you won't come back to a nice ink or stencil. It's easy enough for me to keep up with that type of stuff but in the middle of a busy production day and if I'm not babysitting things I can see the ink being misused and then things will go downhill from there quickly.
On the next 100% poly job with only white ink I'll give this ink a better test in a real production setting. We've got 2 of those jobs in queue now and one of them is smaller and I can run it on the manual. After that I'll run the big job on the auto and I'll push the ink to the limit of our press. I really wish it would work on cotton garments but we have plenty of jobs where we can mate a specialty ink with a specific garment type and not lose any time farting around with something new. I'll keep everyone informed as we use it for anyone who is interested. I'll post pics when I do something that I can post publicly.
