Wilflex Fashion Soft vs. Finesse

[cvreeland]

When I want to render a nice soft-hand ink for printing on lights or over a discharge base, I've been adding Wiflex Finesse, and perhaps reducing with a bit of the Union visc. reducer so that the ink flows easily through a 230.

Would I see an appreciable difference in the soft-handedness of the final print if I switched to the Fashion Soft base for this, or is it worth messing with?

FWIW, I mostly use the Union Ultrasoft series to mix color, with a few of the Epic Fluorescent colors, because they're brighter than Union's.

I'v got a cutomer specifically requesting a "very soft-hand or waterbase feel," but they want medium colored shirts with a bright yellow, & they specifically don't want to dischare them, so I want to hopefully just get as thin of a layer of plastisol as possible.

Should I stick with my Ultrasoft + Finesse + reducer normal mode, or should I order me a gallon of this Fashion Soft base? What say ye?

[JBLUE]

We use Fashion soft base for a lot of our transparent prints. On lighter colors you can get it feel like WB you just sacrifice opacity when the garments get to the darker side.

[cvreeland]

The shirts are lt. blue. I figure I can mix the yellow a little brighter in the can than the specced pantone #.

[mk162]

i am not a finesse fan.  I used to be, but I much prefer curable reducer now.  Finesse only goes up to 5% by weight(i think)

I also like pouring my reducer from a bottle or a squeeze bottle, much easier to work with.

[Printficient]

Xenon has a product that is a combination of the two. We call it Xenbase. Brad has some of his shop. Wish he would let me know what he thinks of it.

[cvreeland]

Finesse only goes up to 5% by weight(i think)

That doesn't seem right. I use finesse with my Tru-Tones, up to 60-70% and I've never had a curing problem. My general understanding is that Finesse is essentially a clear base -- i.e. ink with no pigment in it. It was originally recommended to me for its thixotropic properties because it's a fraction of the cost of the Union Tru-Tone clear base, & I needed something to control density on process jobs at the time. I've since adopted it for everything, and use it to base down inks for soft-hand printing all the time.

[cvreeland]

Yeah, Here's the product info sheet as a .pdf file.

[JBLUE]

Same with fashion base. It cures as well. 5-10% if you want to keep the opacity anything more it starts to go transparent. We have ran it up to 90% base to 10% mixed color. We do not use straight pigments in it.

http://www.polyone.com/en-us/about/businessgroups/Inks/Literature/Wilflex%20Fashion%20Soft%20Base.pdf

[cvreeland]

Great! I have a gallon on the way.

[ZooCity]

I prefer Soft Hand Clear to Fashion Soft although we keep a bucket of either.

Why? Fibrilation.  Fashion soft just will not matt down super well, soft hand clear does a little better.  I use the fashion soft very infrequently because of this.  It has it's place though. 

How about HO waterbased?  We don't currently run HO WB in the shop but I've seen some Matsui HO do one hit whites when I used it for art classes I used to teach, mostly with kids.  Yeah...kiddos pulling one hitters onto AA Ts through a beat ass static frame on a press I made from old rototex parts and jiffy clamps, I had to laugh at that seeing as we often struggle to do it with our much more sophisticated methods. 

Anyways, Matsui, I guess Rutland's HSA (though they are weirdos about selling it) and... I want to say GenIV (sp?) and Permaset or something like that makes them.  I'm sure you could mix your own with WB PCs and an appropriately thick base as well. 

It still has a hand though since you are essentially building it up on top of the garment as with plastisol, sometimes it seems to have just as much hand as properly printed plastisol but I recall it would soften after washing whereas plastisol does not.

Does the client not want DC b/c of the ZFS or is it a substrate thing?

[mk162]

Sorry, I had my numbers wrong, it says 50% in the old Wilflex users guide I have.

It is pretty darn cool that Wilflex was born in my hometown.

[alan802]

The fashion soft is terrible with wet on wet printing.  I added some to several different inks for a larger run and the buildup was terrible.  I had to flash the inks on white shirts and then stop about every 50 shirts and scrape the screens with puddy knives it was so bad.  The ink wasn't a great wow ink to begin with, but the fashion definately made it worse. 

[ZooCity]

The fashion soft is terrible with wet on wet printing.  I added some to several different inks for a larger run and the buildup was terrible.  I had to flash the inks on white shirts and then stop about every 50 shirts and scrape the screens with puddy knives it was so bad.  The ink wasn't a great wow ink to begin with, but the fashion definately made it worse.

I really believe in just running a good wow ink and sticking to that.  I've found WFX's standard Epic base to be fine in the "soft hand" department for 95% of the work we do.  It's more about nailing down the right ink deposit and printing it well I think. 

Soft Hand Clear of Fashion Base is used only for jobs that will not involve WOW printing because, yes it totally sucks for that; too much buildup, horrible gain/ability to hold good dots, squishes around, does that god awful "peaking" thing, too freaking glossy, etc, etc.   Even when using it we typically drop it in as a % of the base- ex.// 500g base would be 300g regular base, 200g soft hand clear - in a mix rather than adding to a mix and losing opacity.  Loving WB and low activated DC for this nowadays.

[cvreeland]

So I'm having a weird problem with this stuff today. It seems incompatible with my Kiwo HWR photoemulsion. The ink is gumming up in the screens really badly.

I recall having this problem years back with the Union Tru-Tones and one particular pure polymer emulsion, (can't remember the brand) but had never seen it otherwise.

Anybody else seen this?

[alan802]

Isn't HWR a dual cure?  So the ink is essentially mixing in with the emulsion as if it were underexposed?  Which I'm pretty sure it's not underexposed since you know what you're doing, but that's the type of thing I've seen with discharge inks and stencil breakdown on press from underexposure.  I guess I'm asking if it resembles an underexposed screen and WB inks?