Would anyone who sprays down their screens with a water retardant combo care to suggest a retarder to achieve this? If you don't want to share publicly please message me.
We use the CCI Retarder. Works great
I spend most of my time printing posters with waterbased ink made by TW graphics and have never seen it spoil.
This is wild, we have a shop in the same city and we also use TW graphics ink. It seems like our custom mixed colors have a shelf life of a couple months in the summer before they become completely unusable. But it is probably because our poster printing area is in the same warehouse floor as our t-shirt printing area / conveyor dryer
We keep spray bottles with a mixture of water/retarder in them, we call the "special needs water". On long runs if the ink is getting thicker we give the screens 2 quick sprays when they are flooded. If you spray too much it tends to mess up the ink for the next print because it is too "special".
We do the same thing, however, I have found you can get away with more than 2 sprays if you are careful about mixing the retarder / water combo into your ink with your squeegee. Your motion should be more like a flood, back and forth, where your squeegee isn't making contact with the surface of the screen. That way you are mixing the solution into the ink on the top of the screen, rather than making it interfere with your stencil, which definitely does cause problems. You probably can't do this on an auto very easily though, we hand print everything (no auto)
