QCM has a philosophy, a mindset if you will, about what white ink should be. We design all our inks based on this simple idea: We want your print experience to be a pleasant one. In order to achieve this goal we design each ink to be:
- Creamy: This means that the ink is easy to stir in the bucket and is easy to print on a manual or automatic press. This also means the squeegee blade will easily slide over the image on your press of choice.
- Easy to print: This goes hand in hand with having a creamy ink. "Easy to print" means that the ink will easily clear the screen during printing, leaving a clean image area, and the squeegee blade will easily slide over that image area. This also means that our white inks will not be runny or pourable (which is very difficult to keep under control on press). They will have enough body, or firmness, that they maintain their shape both on press and on your garment. The ink will relax just enough so that it will not stick to your squeegee blade and not come down. This also allows the ink to keep incredible edge and dot detail through all mesh counts. Our inks are able to more closely recreate a grayscale image that matches your film positives than any competitor's ink.
- Opaque: Obviously, we all want to print the most opaque white ink available! As a result of this desire, each ink is as opaque as possible for its intended garment type. What's more, we do not add cheap blowing agents to our whites to "cheat" on its opacity. All our inks finish with a very smooth, very clean, bright finish. As always, in order to maximize your opacity, please choose an optimal thin thread mesh coated with an emulsion that completely encapsulates the mesh creating an optimal EOM (Emulsion Over Mesh ratio). Upon flooding your image area, this will allow enough ink to fill the "gasket" that is your stencil and to create a very opaque finished print.
- Fast flashing: All of QCM's inks are very fast to flash. Now, there are many nuances to how well an ink flashes. Let's start with some definitions. The definition of flashing when applied to plastisol ink is this: The amount of time and heat needed to achieve a "semi-solid" gel state of the ink, where the ink is dry to the touch and will not come off on your finger. As stated, all our inks are very fast flashing with little to no after flash tack. The definition of tack is this: After the ink reaches a gel state, it can experience some level of stickiness or "tack" while still hot (above 140 degrees fahrenheit). Example: After flashing the print, you touch the design with your finger to see if it has properly gelled, while ink will not come off on your finger, the print will stick to it. This stickiness is referred to as "tack". "After flash tack" can be very minor, where it does not affect printing, to very severe; where the next screen to touch the tacky ink will stick to the print and won't come off.
As we know, not all whites are the same, or even print the same. This is why we have created such an in depth white ink selector. Depending on the type of garment you are printing on (cotton, 50/50 poly cotton blends, nylon athletics, etc...) the print properties of the ink will change.
Here is an overview of the different white ink types:
Cotton inks, like our XOLB-109, need no added chemicals to fight the dye migration problems that plague blended garments, since they are designed ONLY for 100% cotton. As a result, cotton whites are considered very pure and clean whites (chemically speaking). These inks are the easiest to make printer friendly and a joy to print with.
Multipurpose inks, like our XOLB-158, have chemicals added to the ink to fight the ever present problem of dye migration in blended garments. These added "bleed fighters" tend to make inks thicker bodied than cotton inks, so more care is taken to make sure the inks are as printer friendly as possible. Unfortunately, the more bleed resistance you need from an ink, the thicker it will become. This is an undeniable fact.
Polyester white has the highest level of bleed resistance available in a white ink. Because of these additional chemicals, the PERM-170 is our thickest bodied white ink. However, it is still considered creamy and easy to print in comparison to other polyester whites in the market today.
Athletic inks have an unfortunate duty of needing to be not only a low bleed ink, but also abrasion resistant, have very high adhesive properties (won't come off of nylon garments), and cure at lower than normal plastisol cure temps (to ensure delicate garments do not melt while curing). Again, all these extra properties cause the ink to become thicker than our standard cotton whites.