Joe Clarke's Ink

[bimmridder]

Alan has talked about a new white by Joe Clarke. Joe and his son Joe Jr. just launched their site. If you are a plastisol printer, I strongly suggest at least checking out the site. They offer more than just white. I hope I attached a good link below.

http://www.synergyinks.com/

[ericheartsu]

we tried our sample batch on wed. of white.

Seems like it prints really great, but it's recommended to stir it up. It's a short bodied ink, so you have to dial your flood in as well.

[alan802]

Rather than post on my thread I'll go ahead and post a short review while I have the chance.  It took us a while to get into a position to test the ink as I wanted, and I started my thread prematurely before I had a good chance to test it therefore the lack of a full review.

So, as most of you know, I'm a white ink junkie, I will try out any ink anyone is willing to send my way, and most of the time I actually pay for it .  When Joe mentioned to me that he was thinking about getting a new white ink on the market I knew that some day we'd be here talking about a product that was going to be different than the average white ink.  I personally haven't spoken to all the guys in our industry that have a ton of knowledge about inks, more specifically white ink, but I have no doubt that Joe knows more than 99.99% about inks, and more importantly, how the printing process works and how to make an ink that is optimal for what we're trying to accomplish.  A few years ago we started mixing white inks to get a product that was exactly what I wanted in many characteristics but with doing that, there are many aspects of an ink that I can't control and no amount of mixing different inks is going to make up for that.  I've known for a while what I think is a great white ink, it has to do a lot of things well, all the while being printer friendly in that it doesn't climb the squeegee (the most common deal breaker for many of us) and each of us then has their own "deal breakers" for an ink that differ a good bit. We print differently than most every shop in the country, as fast as is possible, with less pressure than most, different blades than the average shop will use, not trying to brag but it's important to say because I really think our standard for a white ink is higher.  I know this to be true by reading reviews of other white inks that I've used extensively or at the very least tested thoroughly and feel that the ink getting great reviews didn't test well or perform well enough for us.  There is also the fact that each shop is different in how they print that I have to keep that in mind but there are a few ink characteristics that don't change from shop to shop and it is usually good, bad, or average no matter how it was printed.

So with my babbling out of the way, let me give a brief review.  I was trying to get a job on press that would really test the ink and it's ability in the most demanding way, but really, the vast majority of shops that need to know about this ink aren't going to be doing a one-hit white on black garments so it doesn't make much sense to test the ink that way for the sake of a review.  It is important for us to have an ink that can manage a one-hit situation and I know that if an ink is good enough to do one-hits then it will perform well in other, less taxing scenarios. 

I tried to push the ink to the limit on print speed and for the mesh counts we used we maxed out the press at 30"/sec.  So if it will print at 30, it will print at the average shop speed of 6.  So it passes that test with flying colors.  I know with the ink passing the one-hit test that the opacity of the ink is well above the industry average so it's 2 for 2.  With the way we operate here, flash time is very important, and when we ran a large job the other day I got our flash time down to just above the fastest flashing ink I've ever tested which is a poly white.  So it flashes incredibly fast, especially for a cotton white.  3 for 3.  Matte down is next, this is a hard one for me to talk about since I don't have anything to quantify it's performance and there are many other variables that can come into play.  I'd like to test the matte down further with a few garments that I know are very hard to get a smooth print on, but for the garments we've printed on, it passed that test easily.  4 for 4.  So now we have after-flash tack.  We print directly after a flash often, and having a white ink that will flash fast and not have after-flash tack is very important.  To be honest, I have not ran a job that we printed on top of the base directly after a flash, but you can get a good feel for tack just by touching a freshly flashed ink and in that little test it was perfect.  This ink should be great for those shops like us that are printing 7 and 8 color jobs on a 10 color press and having cool down stations isn't possible and doing multiple revolutions is also not possible (well, it's not something we like to do).  5 for 5.  So does it climb the squeegee?  I haven't ran a large job to know this for sure, but I can run a spatula through an ink and tell you if the ink is going to climb, and I don't think this ink isn't going to do that.  It's not that short in body, in my opinion it's more of a short/medium body which allows it to shear fast yet not climb.  It's fairly close to the old QCM 158 in body, not as fluffy, has more heft than the 158, but I'd say they're close in body.  6 for 6.  For some reason, maybe it's because I got a bunch of people bothering me this morning but I can't think of anything else at the moment to share about the ink.  Oh, optically it's a true bright white.  It's not shiny, it's not dull, it doesn't stand out one way or the other like some white inks do when it comes to the actual "whiteness" of the ink.

So right now we've used the ink progressively more and more and I'm still watching over it closely but told my printer to use it on his own now without me helicoptering around.  I'll continue to monitor it, and I'll keep posting as we do different things with the ink and push it further.  But for now, that should give you guys a good idea of what it can do.  It's a high quality ink, it might be able to perform much higher than many would ever need but I think it's better to have and not need than to need and not have.

[IntegrityShirts]

Ordered a gallon to try out!

[LoneWolf2]

Where can I snag a gallon of this to try?

[Frog]

bimm linked to the site, but here it is again
http://www.synergyinks.com/

[LoneWolf2]

Whoops, completely missed that. Thanks!

[joemc42]

We've been using the white, the black and the Magic for a couple of months and they are outstanding.We have never had a white that we like this much, and the black is awesome too.As Alan said, it won every category we tested, and we have used quite a few whites from different manufacturers.It clears exceptionally well, matte down is phenomenal,no after flash tack,smoothest base surface to print on top of that we have ever seen.Flashes FAST,and opacity is outstanding.It has covered all the bases.The black is that perfect black that we have always been looking for.The finish, the hand,printability and lack of build up are exactly what we wanted.So then we added some Magic additive to some royal blue from another ink company.We found that after adding the Magic we were getting a much better overcoat of the blue on a solid white base(something that we have had problems with for a while) and the color was much cleaner and stronger.We have since stirred in the Magic to several inks and have achieved better halftones and stronger,cleaner colors in the prints.I highly recommend trying any or all of the three.I think you'll enjoy the experience.

[sqslabs]

To those who have tried the Magic, have you seen any improvement with problem WOW colors?   Or would that be something that would depend more on the original ink itself?  Our current "Magic" is QCM Softee Base but by the description I'm under the impression that Synergy Magic is a whole different animal, and am definitely interested in hearing more about that.  Will be ordering a gallon today for testing.

I'll likely be passing on the black and white due to the cost, which pains me as I'm sure they print great.  I just can't justify spending twice as much (or more) to fix problems that we aren't seeing with our current inks.  And although the idea of being able to run solid areas of black on the same screen as fine halftones is tempting, I don't find myself in that situation enough for it to make sense costwise unless we only used it in those instances.

[alan802]

I've used the base in problem buildup inks and it has helped on some but not every one I've tried it on.  It isn't made as a WOW additive and it certainly won't add to the buildup of an ink like many additives like reducer and soft hand clear.  But I remember using the QCM softee base all of the time on bad inks and it didn't help with WOW on all of the inks I used it on, but it did help with the majority of them.  I think the Magic base will work in some cases but at this point I don't have enough experience with it and haven't tested it as a WOW additive to say with confidence that it works or doesn't. 

[ZooCity]

I hated all soft hand/softee type inks for WOW printing.  We used to cut in some soft hand to our Wilflex mixes and it screwed up our WOW printing on plasti ub for years.  Banned that stuff and culled out all the soft hand inks and have seen improvements.  It's probably OK for printing on a dc ub but just about anything is. 

I ordered the White and Base, very excited about both of those but I don't see where the Magic fits in.  Our inks don't need flow additives and such and with an even better base should be great.

[alan802]

We use the Magic to bring back to life a lot of the junk ink we have.  Some of our inks are 15 years old and put some Magic in and we've got an ink that you'd think was made by the big ink companies.   

[ericheartsu]

we just did 500pc run with it today...still need to dial in the flood, as we were getting a really splotchy flood.

[DannyGruninger]

Finally got my hands on Joe's ink last week. I have burned through about 6 gallons of white and black so far. I plan to do a full write up later on after I get through all my testing but so far I'm extremely impressed with this ink. I have attempted on several jobs to get the black ink to build up and so far I haven't been able to get it to build at all even when printing black first on a multi color design. Out of all the black ink's for plastisol printing I have not found one that I like more then this.


Here's a quick video of us printing a pretty blocky white patch of ink using joes white. Notice how fast the squeegee stroke is running on this(about 80%) as this ink flows through the mesh like butter. With a 150/48 or 225/40 mesh I can run the squeegee stroke at full speed with great coverage. All in all just super excited about this ink from the little bit I have worked with it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGwwmqujntU&feature=youtu.be

[jvanick]

have you tried it on any blends yet?  Or is it still only a 100% cotton ink?