Printing on dark garments with a white ink can be difficult. Sometimes the tagless label is simply not bright enough and the darkness of the garment shows through. Here at Inkcups Now, we understand your frustration and have provided some great tips for you to get that white bright!

To get a brighter white:

try reducing your thinner mixture by 5%.
The mixture commonly use is:

50 grams White
7.5 grams SBM thinner (15%)
2.5 grams 1000HNX hardener (5%)

Add a 1 second delay before pickup and 1 second before print. Adjust front and back delay to see if you get improved results.

Make sure you increase the pad compression on the garment so the pad “over-compresses” or nearly stalls during the printing cycle

Make sure your pads are not worn

Make sure you used enough ink in the cup – it is a common problem to put too little ink into the cup with white because its pigments are so heavy. 50 gram of white ink is a minimum mixture

If you have artwork flexibility, go to all capital letters for size and country of origin

It is common to have to add thinner more frequently to white ink because it has more pigment than all the other colors. The thinner helps keep the pigment in solution.

Try using inks other than standard white ink – Inkcups Now has developed a new product called SuperWhite Ink with pigments especially designed for garment printing.

If you have any questions or are interested in tagless printing or SuperWhite ink, please click here.

Ink used in this project:
Type: SuperWhite Ink
Brand: SB Series Ink
More info: SB Series SuperWhite Ink page

Technorati tags: Tagless Printing, Bright Ink, Pad and screen printing ink” target=”_blank”>Pad Shuttle, Apparel Labels

The ICN Sapphire brand ink has been called many things in the past. “Screen printing ink“, “pad printing ink”, even “gunk”. Just don’t call it PAINT!

Pad printing ink is not suitable for coating walls, chairs or landscapes. Which is exactly why pad printing ink is not called “paint.” Ink contains coloring molecules that are dissolved in a liquid. Paints will have pigments, that is coloring molecules that are in suspension in a liquid (but not dissolved.) You must work harder in order to keep paint mixed together.

Pad printing ink is formulated to transfer images from an etched plate to 3-dimensional, irregularly shaped or flat objects. Among the various applications of pad printing inks are the following: printing on promotional products (pens, travel mugs, golf balls), medical devices, car components and tagless t-shirts.

Sapphire series screen and pad printing inks are triple milled to micron level pigment sizes yielding one of the industry’s most opaque and brilliant color palettes. You can literally see the difference as soon as you open a can of ink.

To the many experienced people in the printing industry and the many more just starting out: You know the difference, you see the difference. So please do not call ink, paint!

Are you not getting the results you want from your ink? Click here and find out how to make the best prints possible.

Tagless label printing is the apparel industry’s newest and hottest trend! Here is a tag-less video of an actual company that is using the B100 tagless pad printing machine. As the video shows, it is very fast and easy to use in production. Not only does the pad printing ink dry instantly (which allows for stacking or direct packaging of the fabric), but it also has a “soft hand” texture (no rough surfaces.) The B100 pad printer can generate 1200-2000 prints per hour (depending upon the quality), and best of all tagless printing is cheaper than heat transfer!

Printer used in this project: Type: Semi-Automatic Pad Printer Brand: ICN-B100 Model: Single Color Standard applications: neck tagless labels, pens, stress balls, other metal and plastic parts… Unconventional applications: cookies, contact lenses More info: ICN-B100 Tagless Pad Printer Page Technorati tags: Tagless Production, T-Shirt Labels, Tagless Apparel

Are you struggling with keeping opened pad or screen printing ink and hardener fresh?
We have a convenient solution: the VersaCover! Don’t miss our commercial to air at the Super Bowl. Here is a sneak preview, just for you:

The VersaCover hermetically seals nearly all ink and hardener cans available on the market.
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Everyone in the pad printing and screen printing industry could do with some useful ink tips now and then to freshen up the memory and maybe learn something new! That’s why we want to bring up some common ink issues and how to go about solving them.

• Add a touch of blue to make your white ink brighter

We happen to get calls from customers sometimes asking about how to brighten white screen printing or pad printing ink. To do so you can actually just add a touch of blue color to it. More specifically, #32 from any of our ink series would be the best option.

• How to handle misprints

Removing misprints from plastics is also a issue for some people. The best way to handle it is to use our Ink-Away Remover to clean the substrate and then overprint the shadow before removing the object from the nesting fixture. However, if the ink attacks the plastic it may be impossible to re-claim the item.

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Take a look at this! Would you ever think this is a part of a very expensive tool used for measurement applications?

As a matter of fact, this object is part of an extremely sophisticated measuring device called FARO Laser Tracker. We wanted to make sure the imprinted plastic artwork came out just perfect! In the matter of 4 days, Paul had pad printed enough parts to assemble $2.5 million worth of laser trackers. And as Paul nicely put it when I went to take pictures of it; “You better not drop this…!”

Our customer responsible for the markings realized that using stickers was no longer cost-efficient and that plastic pad printing was the best way to go. So for this job we used the ICN-150 pad printing machine. Paul was in charge of training our customer and making sure that the printing process was running smoothly.

The ICN-150 is a 2 color pad printer but we had five different colors and symbols to work with so it had to be done in turns; starting off with red and silver, followed by yellow and black, and finally green.

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Does this image not look laser engraved? Yet it is printed, with all its fine lines. Not only the ink looks great, you can save money with it!
Click on the image to view it closer.
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