Salutations, fellow warriors of the print realm.
A year or so ago we switched over to CCI spot black. While the ink rules, we have repeatedly run into the issue of tiny dried up chunks of this ink getting stuck into the mesh during printing, which blocks the ink from going through. It can be very tedious to work around this problem - for a one color print that we should crank through, I have to check each shirt before proceeding to the next, to see if any of the stencil is blocked by the tiny dried up bits. The bits are very difficult to detect by just looking at the screen. I'd say on average these bits adhere to the screen and obstruct the stencil every 1 out of 4 prints. We've begun storing the ink in our darkroom, which stays cooler than our production area, in an effort to solve this issue, and while that seems to help a little bit, it is still very much a problem. Other practices we follow with this ink - before dumping the ink on the screen, we mist the screen with water and wipe the standing water off with a rag, which hydrates the dry mesh, and makes it so the ink doesn't lose its hydration when hitting the dry screen. We also immediately mist the open mesh as soon as we finish printing, to limit how much the black ink stains the screen. Also, at the end of each day, or several times a day, I will rehydrate the bucket of Spot Black and mix it up really good, so the ink we have been printing with is remixed into the fresh bucket ink.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
