Tried a New White

[alan802]

Plastisol ink from Rutland last week and I thought I'd share that with the gang.  It's EL9330 NPT FF LB Tidy White and damn was it great.  I'm still using the Miami Smooth with a rotating gaggle of Poly whites like Rutland Poly, Triangle Excel and Xenon's Horse (worst name for an ink I've ever heard but oh well).  I was sent this gallon to try out for this test print among a few other experiments and I must say I really liked working with it.

This Tidy white seemed like it was going to be a bit too short at first but I put it in the auto for a One Hit experiment I've been working on with an industry guru, he sells squeegee blades and I won't name drop but his name starts with Joe.  We've been doing some sample printing trying to get this one design as a one hit white and doing testing whenever I can.  I successfully achieved the one hit white with the Tidy while all other inks have failed to give me the opacity, print speed etc that I needed.  I have gotten really close with the other whites I've tried but I'd get around to the 90% opacity, sometimes close to 95% then we'd reach the failure point of one or more variables and have to change mesh counts, ink, stencil or whatever.  So I've got a few photos and I'm not sure how they're going to turn out but I've got a PFP of the shiner logo along with a CCI D-White print, along with two of my One Hit prints.  In person and at 1' away you can tell what is what, but my iphone pics will have to do for now.  The opacity level of the one hits isn't as bright as the PFP but they are more opaque than about 90% of the shirts I see come through our door from other print shops and at retail stores.  I know a lot of our competitors would be jumping up and down with this print but honestly it's not up to our PFP white prints and it would be impossible for it to be.  The PFP was done on a 123/55 mesh at 25 newtons, Manny blade and was about 75% opaque from the UB strike so the flash and additional stroke took it way beyond the needed 100% mark.  I did the One Hit test prints with a 100/55 mesh at 25 newtons, Dr J as my fill blade, at 20"/sec, then the White Knight squeegee blade printing with an 86 degree angle at 30"/sec, .12" off contact and 22-23 psi print pressure.  It did take some time to get to the level I was looking to be at, with Joe on speaker phone but we finally nailed it.  I have also done 3 production jobs that were fairly large print area, both full fronts and backs equivalent to the shiner print size using the same techniques and tools with one stroke and down the dryer.  We are starting to do more and more jobs this way but I do see a limit to the size of the print area that can achieve the opacity with one stroke, so it's not like we'll be doing this for every job, but we are doing it on jobs now that I never thought would be possible.



One hit on navy


One hit on black


I called to check the 5 gal price of the Tidy white...and here is the giant fart noise.  $380!!!  I'm seriously considering buying a fiver and just not worrying about the cost, it's really a good white, fast flashing, creamy, short bodied but not too short, and optically white.  It's not so thick that you can't work it really fast and with very little print pressure.  Two thumbs up on performance, two down on price, dayum Rutland, throw me a bone for plugging this great white ink.

[cbjamel]

Thats a price of 76 a gal.

Pretty good in my estimation of price that I pay. Close to 100 a gallon.

Shane

[DannyGruninger]

Alan, thanks for posting. I'm constantly testing different/new whites to find that ultimate "out of the bucket" white. The only thing is @ $380 for 5 it would need to be totally badass. Right now our white we are paying $240.00 for five for a 50/50 style type of white. Out of the bucket we have to modify it slightly but it's been a good white for us. We were using quick white for a long time paying $296 for 5 but that was getting a bit pricy imo. We usually print 10-15 gallons of white a week so that increase would hurt us. I suppose it would be nice to have it around for the 1 hit's or the trouble jobs that come up where we need a stronger white. Just out of curiosity how many gallons of white are you rolling through?

[Homer]

I have a few kicking around here too - I still love phoenix white though, it just needs to stay a little warmer than some others we tried, it's 70/gal but i'm ok with that... We were given some CCI 1803 to try, and Brad from Maverick brought me a sample of something else but it was rather.....thick..... Have any of you guys tried Wilflex Solar white? I guess it's not technically a wilflex formula but it's 200.00 /5g. I was looking for a quick, cheap down n dirty cotton white...from my testing, playing with the squeegie duro and angle play just as much of a role as the ink....it's just so hard to stick with one white when there are soo many to pick from and prices ranging from uber cheap to sell your first born...

[ericheartsu]

i just bit the bullet and bought a 5'r of the ICC poly white. It's expensive, but the best poly ink i've ever used.

[alan802]

Alan, thanks for posting. I'm constantly testing different/new whites to find that ultimate "out of the bucket" white. The only thing is @ $380 for 5 it would need to be totally badass. Right now our white we are paying $240.00 for five for a 50/50 style type of white. Out of the bucket we have to modify it slightly but it's been a good white for us. We were using quick white for a long time paying $296 for 5 but that was getting a bit pricy imo. We usually print 10-15 gallons of white a week so that increase would hurt us. I suppose it would be nice to have it around for the 1 hit's or the trouble jobs that come up where we need a stronger white. Just out of curiosity how many gallons of white are you rolling through?

I counted 45 gallons of empty white ink buckets in the corner the other day but it's been since October/November since I had the last load hauled off.  I'll have to look at my purchasing book and see but it's probably close to 5 gallons a week on an average week, but I have had a few weeks recently where we went through about 10 in a week.  Those 5K piece jobs with a giant front and back print will such down some white ink, and we've been fortunate enough to have several of those already this year.  I really hated that the 7K piece job was all 50/50's of assorted colors and I had to burn through a ton of $100/gal poly white.  I let the sales person know how much more the job cost us since they were 50/50's.  All cotton and I could have used the $40/gal...stung a little bit.

[ZooCity]

Delicates charge.  Add one to your system. Tell your sales team that anything that's not 100% cotton gets it. You could even make a new price matrix for it I suppose.  I have it setup in ours so that it displays on the line as "Delicates/poly" so the client knows that's part of the run, but is rolled into the pricing so there's no 'dinger' fees at the bottom line.  $0.25 per is the start point and I'll go higher if it's, god forbid, a 12x12 slab of epic performance ink going on a shirt or something. 

The inks needed for poly and bad 50/50 bleeders cost exponentially more nowadays and it needs to be addressed in pricing.  The cost is not gonna go down although the tech seems to be improving (silicone).  Epic perf white is $125-150 a gal so that's double ink costs which justifies an added price.

[alan802]

Delicates charge.  Add one to your system. Tell your sales team that anything that's not 100% cotton gets it. You could even make a new price matrix for it I suppose.  I have it setup in ours so that it displays on the line as "Delicates/poly" so the client knows that's part of the run, but is rolled into the pricing so there's no 'dinger' fees at the bottom line.  $0.25 per is the start point and I'll go higher if it's, god forbid, a 12x12 slab of epic performance ink going on a shirt or something. 

The inks needed for poly and bad 50/50 bleeders cost exponentially more nowadays and it needs to be addressed in pricing.  The cost is not gonna go down although the tech seems to be improving (silicone).  Epic perf white is $125-150 a gal so that's double ink costs which justifies an added price.

I agree and have thought about that a lot since that big run.  It literally took $350 right out of the bottom line and it was something I just took for granted that they'd be cottons and about 2 hours before starting the run I just thought I'd look at the tag and started cursing.  I've sat down with every sales person and have stressed that the extra cost of ink for poly's is significant and to try to steer the customer to cotton.  In the past I was more concerned with the print quality being so much better and easier to attain on cotton shirts versus poly but now the cost of ink is a bigger concern.  I may take a look at making a combo ink with the wilflex UB grey mixed with a cheap low bleed white and do some testing.  I believe I could have saved us 250-300 bucks on that last big run if I would have mixed up something.  The great ability of the UB grey would probably mean only a 10-25% ratio with a low bleed white making the cost per gallon around $50-65/gal.  I got lazy and complacent and we lost money.  Oh well, you live and learn.

[ZooCity]

If you are already having them steer toward cotton, take it a step further and setup a preferred cotton line that discharges well, standardize a set of good DC colors and give swatch kits to the sales team, charge for any DC mixes outside standard and revert to plastisol or DCUB/plasti for any garment not in the preferred set. 

You'll save so much in ink on the bulk of the runs that you can just afford to have quality low bleed and poly inks and run them as needed, it'll balance out.

Don't beat yourself up over the fact that some of our basic consumables have nearly tripled in price over a very short period of time.  We all need to address the issue and it starts with pricing.  There's no reason a shop should not be able to reach for the right ink and have to revert to concocting mixes that are affordable but still effective.

[Ryan]

Alan did you not have a problem with the Tidy white climbing the squeegee? I had a gallon bucket here, loved the end result but it would stick to the squeegee. I couldn't even get a flood out of it because it was stuck to the squeegee or floodbar depending. wondering if they made any changes to the formula. I agree that it is very optically bright white and had a nice smooth matte finish. Wish it didn't climb my squeegee. Did you do anything to it?

[alan802]

Alan did you not have a problem with the Tidy white climbing the squeegee? I had a gallon bucket here, loved the end result but it would stick to the squeegee. I couldn't even get a flood out of it because it was stuck to the squeegee or floodbar depending. wondering if they made any changes to the formula. I agree that it is very optically bright white and had a nice smooth matte finish. Wish it didn't climb my squeegee. Did you do anything to it?

I thought it would climb really bad but it didn't.  Once I got it stirred and moving it rolled really well and wasn't climbing bad at all.  I'd liken it to a really stirred and warm batch of qcm 158.  Granted I have not done a long run of more than 100 shirts but it wasn't climbing noticeably on the smal runs I've used it for. 

[Zelko-4-EVA]

Have any of you guys tried Wilflex Solar white? I guess it's not technically a wilflex formula but it's 200.00 /5g.

we use solar white everyday - last year we used over 600 gallons of it.

S9027 Solar White was an ink from Plast-O-Meric. 

[whitewater]

the more i read about white inks, well inks in general, not many members here use Union inks?

am i missing the boat?

[inkman996]

the more i read about white inks, well inks in general, not many members here use Union inks?

am i missing the boat?

I use tons of union.

I think Unions problem is they do not have a lot of vendors, we buy directly since they are close by but I would be beyond thrilled if a general screen supply company with in one or two days sold Union.

[screenprintguy]

Inkman, Valley Litho sells Union, good pricing too compared to Tublite, not sure how close they are too you, but I've ordered Union from them for a while till Tubelite would beat them by 10% off to sell 5 gals at a time. I love their maxopaque scarlet red, and maxopaque royal.