Reflective Silver on Light Fabric

[ZooCity]

Hey we got some Allureglow Reflective plastisol ink in here.  135/48 S mesh, single stroke.  Great reflectivity.  Since it's transparent however we're not getting enough opacity on the safety yellow on the left.   Double stroke still isn't enough and I understand you should aim for a single stroke for best reflectivity.  Not intended to be underbased sooo.....

...is this normal for the allureglow reflective product?  What about the others- would moving to Wilflex's reflective or IC's yield a more opaque result?

[tonypep]

Actually some reflective products may be underbased; contrary to mfgrs suggestions. Try a gray

[Colin]

Tony is right.  Some inks can be underbased if you are really frikin on point with your ink laydown and the plastisol base the beads are in recedes from the beads enough to assist in reflectivity.

We use the reflective ink with the silver shimmer flake added for more daylight POP, so you are not looking at JUST glass beads.  The product I have came from Ryonet, the optilux 505 (i think...).

We bought the allure glow reflective and a quart of the optilux a few years ago.  The Allure glow looked like it would not lay down enough glass beads to cover properly.  Now that was early in its creation, things might have changed since then.  We tried the Optilux and it gave us what we wanted for the design, partially because of the silver flake added into the ink.

[Orion]

Yes the Optilux Enhanced supposedly has the addition of 5% silver shimmer. I made my own version, regular Optilux with 5% Wilflex silver shimmer printed through 150 Smartmesh, one hit on black poly garment. Sorry for the crappy pic. The one on the left is my enhanced.

[ZooCity]

A gray UB would be perfect here I think, we didn't setup for it since it advised against though.

Colin, I think what you saw is about the same here, my ink guy thinks it's an incorrect mix or something since the ink is very runny and covers poorly.   The TDS states it's opaque and medium bodied and I can't imagine it would be designed to be so translucent if it's not meant to print over a UB.

The tech support person I spoke with, who I think is the owner, was off his rocker (said something about back pain, so maybe meds?) and told us to send the ink back rather than advise.  My ink guy will be relieved since lately our orders for GID with them have been extremely problematic for him.  This reflective ink shipped a week late and I certainly didn't appreciate the rude/weird attitude.  Onward.

I gave Nazdar a ring and we have some Optilux 507 "enhanced" with the silver metallic flake on the way. 

Wilflex has ImageBright which looks nice but is about double the optilux product, doesn't need catalyzed though.  Will try that out next time since most of it is drop ship.

Thanks!

[Colin]

Chris.  Have you looped your print to see how dense the glass beads are?

Btw, you will love the look of the Optilux

[ZooCity]

Colin, I just stuck a loupe on both prints.  Looks like there's not enough in there to cover and make an opaque daylight color.   

This is what my ink guy said right away but of course I assumed we were doing something wrong.   I guess I should stop second guessing him. 

[Colin]

That looks similar to what we got through an 83 mesh when we tested it originally.....

Tried hitting it a few more times and it never got much better.

[Admiral]

I believe when we did a reflective ink print we used 3M.  The best reflectivity for that came with 1 pass, no underbase.  2 passes was worse, underbased was even worse with how reflective the ink was.  Different inks could vary but it only takes about 4 prints to see what is best.

[ZooCity]

Well it's good to know you had the same experience Colin.  I think this ink is simply bush league for lack of a better way to put it.   

Worse, the owner has begun some kind of harassment campaign in my email inbox for some reason.  Never again with this co., jeez.

3M doesn't make a middle gray anymore, just white and a dark grey from what I could see.  I imagine it's some excellent product though.

We'll see but I think the "enhanced" optilux sounds about perfect for a non-ANSI reflective that's more of a special effect than safety item. 

[Sbrem]

Yes the Optilux Enhanced supposedly has the addition of 5% silver shimmer. I made my own version, regular Optilux with 5% Wilflex silver shimmer printed through 150 Smartmesh, one hit on black poly garment. Sorry for the crappy pic. The one on the left is my enhanced.

That's interesting, I thought those inks used a 110, I wouldn't think it would work with a 135s, but now I know I would be wrong. Now, I just need a customer to justify figuring it out, lol.

Steve

[ZooCity]

I think a 135/48 S has about 140µ mesh openings, I think a 100 standard thread would be about the same, Murakami's T thread is 150µ, so pretty close there but I think the mesh opening size of a "110 screen" probably varies a good bit out there in the wild. 

So in terms of open area "regular 100 screen" = a 150T but in terms of matching the actual size of the mesh openings that "regular 100 screen" = 135T   

[ZooCity]

What a difference.  Printed as per TDS instructions and it was perfect on the first strike.

Great daytime look and far better reflectivity.  This product seems to reflect much better from various angles. 

Thanks for the help here and to Nazdar for being a such a professional supplier. 

[livinthedream]

We have switched from the Wilflex Imagebright to Optilux and are very happy. It print well on a number of different fabrics from cotton to 100% poly!

[ZooCity]

We have switched from the Wilflex Imagebright to Optilux and are very happy. It print well on a number of different fabrics from cotton to 100% poly!

I was interested in the wfx product but everyone seems to love the optilux and I can def see why.   I'm actually amazed at it's performance given the price.   How was the imagebright in comparison?