Rutland Tidy White and squeegee climbing...

[jvanick]

... I was given a sample of some Tidy white to try out by one of my suppliers, and I have to say, it's one of the most crazy squeegee climbers that I've ever tried.

It was even climbing the floodbar (never seen this before)

which got me to thinking... can it be poor printing technique that was causing it to climb?

Opacity was good, fiber mat down was good enough, but it climbed like crazy.

Thoughts or suggestions?

I ended up scraping it out of the screen, cleaning the floodbar and squeegee and then putting my standard Wilflex quick white in... absolutely no problems.. great rolling flood, great printability like always.

shop temp around 90 or so... I gave it a shot on the first 100 shirts, and it never got better, in fact, it seemed to get worse the more shirts we printed with it.

[sqslabs]

Tidy White is a very short-bodied ink, which while having excellent print qualities, also has the tendency to climb squeegees.  One solution to this is to mix it with a longer bodied ink, which will solve the climbing issue while retaining the quality of print.  An 80/20 mix of Tidy White and any longer bodied white should solve the problem.  The Wilflex sounds like it would be a good candidate for the 20%.

Full disclosure: Learned at the School of Screenprinting.   

[blue moon]

Tidy white has the highest viscosity drop of any ink we tested. This means it is very stiff when not sheared and very runny when under pressure. I have not manged to test the internal stickiness of the inks yet, but the high viscosity should be a major factor. On two occasions we tried the ink, it was climbing too much for our liking.

On the other hand, if you can get it through the mesh, this should give you a much better print.

pierre

[jvanick]

It did give a great print...  no question about it...

but man, I've never seen an ink climb a flood bar like that stuff did.

heck, it was so sticky that when the squeegee raised, it wouldn't drop back down on the screen.

-J

[Colin]

Sounds like QCM's old XOLB 158......

There is a way they can remedy that....

[blue moon]

Sounds like QCM's old XOLB 158......

There is a way they can remedy that....

not sure which version of 158 you are talking, but the stuff we tried was not even close. Tidy will not even drop down to the screen, it sticks to the floodbar! We got 2 strokes out of it before needing to push the ink down!

pierre

[IntegrityShirts]

That was a big learning curve going from loving QCM 158 on a manual to getting and auto and trying to print with 158 and wanting to tear the walls down around me.

[alan802]

We still use the Tidy but we do cut it with a longer bodied white ink, just enough to keep it from climbing.  I've mixed up a batch of 80% Tidy and 20% One Stroke Production White and that combo was working great, plus the flash times were crazy fast.  Tidy by itself isn't much fun on the auto but it prints so fast, very opaque, fast flashing so I take the time to mix in another ink to deal with it.  And we've used probably a dozen inks with the Tidy and as long as the mix is at least 60% Tidy, we can print on the auto with 20psi and 30"/sec with mesh counts of 150/48 and under.  Some of you that want to give mixing something in with the Tidy, try a poly white ink, they are usually long bodied, fast flashing, great fiber matte down and the longer the body the less you need to mix in.