Premix waterbase black

[ZooCity]

Thread resurrection here.

Pre-mix WB Blacks I've tried:

Matsui 301 - Very nice, always like Matsui's characteristics. ≈$50/gal

Sericol Texcharge Black - good print characteristics but not a good WB black in my opinion. Like most of the texcharge inks, best reserved for it's intended purpose as a mixing black for the Texcharge DC system and not used unactivated as regular WB.  ≈$40/gal

Jantex (mine was branded QCM) Black - weirdo print characteristic, the ink is "gloppy" like many hobby brands, requires a lot of water and a lot of high speed mixing to print well on an auto, but excellent finished print that is very durable after 24+ wash/dry cycles. ≈$???/gal  I got ours for $9/gal on sale!  Should have bought it all.

CCI Spot Black- had such high hopes for this one.  Dry in issues right out of the gates, had to pull and add back abt 8% H20. The D-White on press had no such dry in problems and both were on identical mesh, blade, flood, print speed and pressure setups. Was running a 2 color 1000pc on the auto:  CCI Spot Black then CCI D-White, WOW, screens right next to each other, moving fast.  The CCI Black built up so badly with that "zombie skin" I've heard so many speak of that it physically pulled the emulsion off our white screen about 750 pcs in.  It did cover adequately on red ring spun cotton though.  ≈$40/gal

What else is out there?  I'm surprised finding a good pre-mixed black is so difficult.  We do not modify any of our DC or WB inks save for the addition of around 6% water on average.  No retarder, no penetrants, fixing agents, softeners, etc. etc.  I'd like to keep it that way.  Would revert to Matsui but I've found the chemistry of Matsui wb to sometimes not play well with inks like CCI/Texcharge, it seems they may have different solvent systems.

[ebscreen]

Hey I started this!

And I was just about to order the CCI black to boot!


Sadly, we still mix our own. It does give us a use for that lousy Rutland base we have two
pails of though....

[ZooCity]

Hey, I don't want to totally condemn the CCI, I was really rooting for it, trying to get the bulk of our supplies from a single supplier and preferably one like CCI that can manage to ship items it sells in a timely fashion. It does look great in the bucket but I feel we'd need to modify to get it 100%, they just came out with this and the "pure white" HO wb ink so maybe it's just not there in the formula yet. 

As is, I see the need for retarder and maybe even a pentrant. It needs so much damn water that it starts to cross that line into too runny for my taste.

I don't think mixing it with the CCI "mixing black" and D-Base premium would be effective, might need to overload to far but maybe I'll give it a whirl.  Dumping pigment into a gallon of base once in a while isn't such a big deal in terms of labor. 

[Colin]

Rutland Discharge Base (Why keep 2 different bases....)
10% black WB pigment (it's dense enough for our picky eyes)
~5% Water (for flow characteristics)
Up to 5% Penetrant (I know, it's a lot.  But some fabrics just suuuuuuck!)
Takes 5 minutes to mix up Max.
Under $40 a gallon.
Nice dense blacks.

I will not use CCI waterbase again until they can show me their stuff is greatly improved.

Chris:  The Jantex WB Black's PH balance may have been off.  Standard waterbase can get gloppy/curdled if it goes to far towards the basic side (think I remember it correctly ).  It has to do with the thickening agent used.  That waterbase had been sitting around for a while as well...

[ZooCity]

Ah!  The ph, something I'm just starting to learn a little on, thanks to that Mark Gervais video...that was probably the only "eye opening" thing I got out of it, the ph shift triggering the thickeners to "melt" and allow the ink to encapsulate the fibers.  Makes sense.

When did you try CCI Colin?  It's been outperforming all else in our shop.  I never did lengthy trials with Rutland due to the pigment chunk issue, deal breaker for me. 

Where are you getting the penetrant? 

[ScreenPrinter123]

Was using cci's spot black wb two weeks ago (black and d-white after) and about 40 shirts in noticed the black was actually coming out gray - so weird, as aforementioned it looks awesome in the bucket and whilst loading it on the screen. So I cleaned the screen out and used plastisol black - didn't have time to figure out the issue.

[Colin]

RC Screen Supply is literally a few building over from us.  So I walk down and pick stuff up when needed   Helps that Kelly works there so I can ping him about any hiccups I see during production.  Only time I have seen pigment issues is when it gets clogged in the tips of the pigment container.  That can create headaches when you see it in your screen   I've gotten real good about clearing those.

I will say that the few colors I saw mixed with CCI were more accurate than Rutlands.... But.... Read the rest.

Sooo, Tad from CCI came by the shop back in February/March with Nick from Ryonet to chat about their "new" waterbase mixing system.  I had been hearing rave reviews here for several months about CCI's discharge inks, so I was psyched to try it out.  They both came in, we mixed and printed a nice rich discharge pms red along with their discharge white (this was samples for a 10k plus job coming up, 4 locations, 40k plus prints).  Mixed great, the mixing software worked, ink was very smooth and almost fluffy in consistency, penetrated the fabric like crazy (could see the red coming through the inside of the shirt), discharged amazing at 4% activator and looked absolutely beautiful after it came out of our M&R 12 foot HO Sprint set at 340 degrees running at 6 feet per second i.e. a two minute dwell time.  Tad was happy with the print, Nick thought it looked great, we were all happy.  I asked if there was anything I should have/could have done different with their system and they said nope. 

Then I washed it twice.  At that point you could see the greige color of the garment coming through and discoloring the red..... Yes, the dark cream/grey/greige of the raw shirt color was coming through...  Tad was absolutely adamant that the base was perfect and had EVERYTHING in it you could ever need for a perfect print.  Yea... not so much.  It keeps getting worse each time I wash it since it's now a work shirt.

We ended up getting in Rutlands WB system and ran the job with that.  Went through 30 gallons of discharge base on that job.  Every print sample we washed was awesome.  No greige fiberlation, just ink colored fibers like every job before it.

So, until it is proven to me that their ink is consistently better....  I'll take longevity and durability of print - and happy customers.

[brandon]

Wow. Just curious Alternative Apparel?

[Colin]

Tultex actually.

They feel odd.......  Don't drape very well. 

[ZooCity]

That's strange, all my cci wash tests have been rock solid and we are far from a 12 foot sprint HO. Did the prints hit 350 before exit.  I swear that's somehow important.

The Rutland we have ran was unimpressive- frequent pig chunks, consistency and smell of latex paint. Makes good prints but I prefer the characteristics of cci or sericol.

[Colin]

I don't remember if it was set to 350... I remember 340... But again, CCI's West Coast Technical Sales Rep was standing right there the whole time......

Yea, I was really surprised by my wash results!  But I got corroborating reports from others in my area.  Maybe it was a few bad batches..... but even then, I need greater consistency.  I'm glad everything is solid on your end!

The components CCI use in their inks are really different than Rutlands.  With Rutlands, if it dries out it feels like a rubbery gel almost.  CCI's actually looks and feels a bit foamy and dry.  Which makes sense when you look at it's consistency and how easy it is to print with.  I'll say again, it almost feels fluffy....

In the end, it's about what works best in your shop and gives you the best results!

[Homer]

I am looking for a nice black as well. Scott form CCI came in a week or two ago and we did much the same as Colin , we mixed a nice, bright red and it looked meh coming out of the tunnel along side sericol red ys. I love the rfu system of sericol so the cci pigs are not on the top of my list anymore, EXCEPT for the flou colors.. the software was pretty simple to use but the results were less than stellar. HOWEVER, the D-White and base are awesome.

Talk about a massive fail, we had a few sample gallons of CCI plastisol given to us to try. One was a black called easy flow black, we ran 500 pieces the other day and set up, black, white, flash, royal, red...the black was caked so thick onto the white screen it would print after 150 prints...I have never seen an ink build like this, ever. We asked Scott and knew all about it, he said the baja black would do that too but I can't say i remember seeing that.. Kind of a turn off on their plastisols...

[Nick Bane]

I am looking for a nice black as well. Scott form CCI came in a week or two ago and we did much the same as Colin , we mixed a nice, bright red and it looked meh coming out of the tunnel along side sericol red ys. I love the rfu system of sericol so the cci pigs are not on the top of my list anymore, EXCEPT for the flou colors.. the software was pretty simple to use but the results were less than stellar. HOWEVER, the D-White and base are awesome.

Talk about a massive fail, we had a few sample gallons of CCI plastisol given to us to try. One was a black called easy flow black, we ran 500 pieces the other day and set up, black, white, flash, royal, red...the black was caked so thick onto the white screen it would print after 150 prints...I have never seen an ink build like this, ever. We asked Scott and knew all about it, he said the baja black would do that too but I can't say i remember seeing that.. Kind of a turn off on their plastisols...

have had the same issue trying to hit a red with CCI pigments that looks as good as sericol red.  finally after a few tries and not being able to get a really bright red that would pop off the shirt, i decided to use in place of the discharge base, 50% discharge base and 50% dflo magenta, and added my red pigments to that base mix, mixed, activated and printed, niice bright popping red was the result.  formulas may need to be adjusted slightly to compensate for the pigment already in the dflo magenta.

[ZooCity]

Update on this. 

Did a side by side with Jantex premix black and CCI Spot Black.  Are there any other spot blacks other than Matsui's that we're missing?  As probably mentioned earlier we don't do much Matsui in here as the chemistry doesn't seem to play well with the CCI/Sericol inks.

Jantex does very well on most 100% cotton and has the softest hand.  More affordable and easier to work with on press.

CCI Spot Black outperforms it over a wide variety of fabrics.  Much less fibrilation on poly/cotton and tri blends.  Stiffer hand to the finished ink but still soft and acceptable.  Spot Black's one big (huge?) drawback is it does not perform well WOW.  We like to put black down early in a WOW sequence and, so far, Spot Black has picked up so aggressively that it will actually delaminate the next stencil down on it over 1000 prints.  It can also be a little bit of a pain to work with on press, likes to dry in and requires thinning or even retarding at times.  CCI's W-base in general has the same issue.  Like the d-white, I think this ink could use more penetrant as well.

We're keeping both and tossing in the Jantex for cottons and especially WOW runs.

Here's something crazy- just for gits and shiggles, we tested both on 100% poly performance shirts....and they both look great after many washings. CCI outperformed on this fabric too.  I would not hesitate to run WB black on 100% poly at this point, need to test colors however.

 

[Rockers]

Permaset got a very nice and soft waterbased black.
As for the towel printing posts earlier on in this thread, Matsui do a base that is made only for that purpose, at least here in Japan.There is no feel at all to that base. You will find plenty of print shops here that do only towels, day in day out.
Anyway, the Permaset black is great.