Colin, a member with history and experience in the ink end of the business answered a question about additives over in the Newbie section.
Good stuff! In fact, so good here it is over here as well.Additives - Welcome to a completely new world within the world of textile screen printing.
Curable Reducer: A balanced very low viscosity ink (close to water) that is designed to quickly reduce the "body" or "stiffness" of an ink. When cured it will NOT enahance the softness of a print. But it will make a stiff/difficult to print ink - easier to print. Do not exceed 5%-10% by weight as you WILL begin to see opacity changes when printing onto medium and darker color shirts. However, add as much as needed to accomplish the task at hand. Just make sure to adjust your print as needed. Curable reducer is commonly used by novice printers to assist in getting clean prints until they have climbed up the rungs of the learning curve
Fashion Base: A balanced VERY low viscosity ink (close to water) that is designed to PENETRATE into the fabric of the shirt in order to mimic waterbase inks. When cured by itself, it will exhibit a very very soft feel, have very little "hand" and drape extremely well. It is also used to SOFTEN the hand of standard plastisols. Adding more than 10% by weight will lower the opacity of the ink. The more you add, the lower the opacity. If you have a "pigment system" you can directly add colored pigments to the base to make your inks more opaque. However they will not be as opaque as standard plastisols.
Fashion base feels softer than curable reducer due to several different ingredients. Examples: There are some waxes that feel very silky and the pvc resin is much softer. Think of soft lure baits compared to a squeegee blade kind of soft.
The drawback to using Fashion base and similar bases is that they DO NOT MATTE FIBERS WELL. So any use of the base should be tested before being put into production.
If you have any more questions: Fire Away!
