Smooth Beginnings
In 2013 we launched a new white plastisol ink to the industry called Meteor White by Green Galaxy. Most white plastisol inks are rather thick, ride up on your squeegee, and are hard to print – especially for a manual printer. Meteor White was much thinner, easily released from the screen and yet still was opaque on dark garments. Printers loved it! Especially manual screen printers since it made printing white so much easier! Meteor White quickly became our number one selling ink.
As we entered into a new plastisol ink relationship with Wilflex mid 2016 one of the discussion topics was what to do with Meteor White. Why would we risk changing the formula of our number one selling ink? Meteor White was a cotton-white plastisol ink, cotton-whites have found their place in the industry because of lower costs and easier printability. However, Meteor White, with all of its advantages, had some disadvantages as well. In order to build an ink that passes easier through mesh it needs to be a “wetter” ink and wetter inks do not flash as fast. Opacity also suffers slightly due to the lower pigment load and this typically means printers have to do more pushes or pulls with the squeegee, which ends up costing more because each time you print use that much more ink. Additionally, because it does not have as much thickness it can often seem glossy and crusty in nature. In order to solve some of these issues, we worked with Wilflex on a new formula of Meteor White that was matte, more opaque, and flashed faster. We wanted to launch this to the entire market and earn the business of printers that wanted more of these attributes. What we ended up building was an ink that accomplished all of these things, but was thicker which means it would be harder to print on a manual press.
Simultaneously we also worked on a new, cutting edge formula for a more versatile low bleed white ink that could be printed on blends and cotton. Low bleed white inks are typically thicker and cost more, so while we were working on making Meteor essentially thicker, we started making Lava Low Bleed “flow better” while maintaining all the properties of an opaque, low bleed white. Through several development cycles and production tests with Danny at Denver Print House, we came up with a winning formula. Lava Low Bleed White was not only thinner than our previous Ryonet White, but it released from the screen better, didn’t build up on your squeegee or mesh, flashed faster, and matted down with ease enabling a printer to use higher print speeds and few passes of the squeegee, all with less force and effort. In this video we detailed the difference between Epic Lava Low Bleed White compared to previous whites and Meteor White.
The Power of One
Where is all this going? Through our development journey we have discovered a way to replace two white plastisol inks with one. No longer do you need a thinner/lower cost cotton white plastisol and a thicker/higher performance low bleed white – now you can get the value and the performance you desire out of one ink: Lava Low Bleed White. Danny Gruninger at Denver Print House, who now runs Lava Low Bleed exclusively for his production, confirmed this. He is no longer using a cotton white like our previous Green Galaxy Meteor White and has been seeing greater efficiency by using only the Lava Low Bleed White. With faster print speeds, faster flash time, better matte down, better top color retention, easier flooding, less carding on press, and consistency from batch to batch, Lava Low Bleed is a better choice for any screen printing shop currently using several whites for their production needs.
If you haven’t tried Lava Low Bleed White, give it a shot, we’ll even give you a coupon on your first purchase and are excited to answer any questions you might have! Simply email success@ryonet.com or if you are running a large production shop, please reach out to our Account Team Manager, Mark Shoman: mshoman@ryonet.com!
Thanks for reading! Let us know what you think about the new Lava Low Bleed in the comments!
The post Lava Low Bleed: The White of Your Dreams appeared first on Ryonet Blog.
from Ryonet Blog http://blog.screenprinting.com/lava-low-bleed-white-dreams/
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